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John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. It is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited to have with us today, Anne Palermo. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Aqua Cultured Foods. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Anne.

Anne Palermo: Hi. Hi, John. Great to be here. I am really excited about the opportunity.

John: Hey, it feels like we’re sitting here together. We were chatting offline before we started this show, and you’re sitting in beautiful downtown Chicago, and I’m here in Fresno, and it’s just wonderful to have you on the show. This looks like the sun is shining in Chicago today. So it looks like it’s a great day to be in downtown Chicago, that’s for sure.

Anne: Yeah, it is. It’s gorgeous. It’s really snowy outside right now. So I think a lot of that light is reflecting from the snow on the ground, but it’s pretty out.

John: Hey, this is one of my favorite topics, talking about plant-based alternative food. And especially we’re going to be talking about something that hasn’t been shared a lot right now in the mass media, the issue of plant-based alternative when it comes to seafood. But before we get talking about your great company, that you’ve co-founded and created, here with Aqua Culture Foods, talk a little bit about the Anne Palermo journey. Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? And how do you even get here, Anne?

Anne: Yeah, sure. My story is a little bit non-traditional when you’re talking about people in the alternative protein space. I started my career in finance. So, I’ve got a pretty strong background in finance. I’ve worked at Morgan Stanley, worked at Bank of Montreal. I was very heavy into the finance space. However, I was always very entrepreneurial, very interested in health and wellness, very charitably minded and wanted to find a way to feed the world and end world hunger. And so, I decided to leave finance and go back to school, and learn culinary innovation, and food science, and food tech. After that, I went ahead and started my first CPG company. It was in the food and beverage space. At this time, I developed some proprietary technology around the actual manufacturing process of chocolate. So, that was a really fun experience. But again, it didn’t really touch on near my true purpose, which is in the health and wellness space. And so, I pivoted that to creating a healthy snacking platform. In that platform, I developed more proprietary tech around the manufacturing of a soft center high-protein candy that didn’t use any kind of protein isolates.

And so, with that experience in the product development; of that experience in learning about protein isolates and just food ingredients, and how they work together, it’s when I started to get really interested in the alternative protein space in general. And so, as I was doing that and a lot of research, the alternative protein space in research, and learning more about fermentation science, that’s when I started to get a true love and passion about what the capabilities are within that space. Fermentation is able to create very high-quality proteins, complete proteins, minimally processed proteins. So, they’re really better for you. They’re able to help you retain all naturally occurring proteins, fibers, micronutrients, and they’re all bioavailable. So your body has the ability to digest it and use all the vitamins, minerals, and proteins that are in these kinds of fermentation-based proteins. So, as I started to learn more about them and experiment and test more about them, I was able to develop a really fantastic version of one product. It looked, it touched, it felt exactly like seafood. And most importantly, it didn’t taste like anything. When you think to yourself, how could a product that doesn’t taste like anything be a benefit? Well, that is a key. It’s actually a chef’s dream because you don’t have to mask any off flavors. A lot of products right now have to be highly processed because you have to cover up an off taste. And in order to do that, a lot of extra fats, sugars, and sodium are involved, so you end up with a real long laundry list of ingredients. Some of them are great for you, and some of them aren’t. There’s a lot of pushback about what’s going on and what people are putting into their bodies.

So, by creating a protein that is very nutrient-dense, very readily available, but doesn’t have a flavor, it means that we can add flavor to it with a gentle hand; very natural, very minimally processed, and ultimately better for you. And then, because there are less steps involved, in the long run at scale, our products are going to be able to meet or beat price parity with traditional seafood. So I’m absolutely blown away and excited about what it is that we’re creating. And I just can’t wait for those products to get out there for everyone to try.

John: It’s so exciting. So you were in college, you studied finance before you went into the finance world?

Anne: Yes.

John: Were you, yourself, someone who grew up or as a young adult, involved with the exercise trends or the plant-based eating trends? Were you experimenting yourself in different types of ways of feeling better and being healthier? And this is part of what the journey was for you?

John: Yes, definitely. A hundred percent. I was very involved in the health and wellness space. I can’t say that I was like a bodybuilder bunny chance, but I went to the gym a lot. I was there like 2 to 3 hours every day, for several years. It just became a happy place for me, and that experience really leads you down the path of health and wellness; what to feed your body, what kind of nutrients your body needs, how it works, how everything works together in order to enhance overall wellness, and well-being as well. I think that is where my true interests, passions, and drive for this kind of industry really began.

John: We’ve seen the rise of plant-based alternatives and the massive success of Impossible, of the JUST Egg people, beyond me and others. Why did you choose alt seafood versus protein categories like burgers or chickens to go into?

Anne: Yeah. That’s a great question and one that I have been asked before. There’s a whole lot of reasons. Let’s start, in general, with just ocean health. Right now, 90% of wild fisheries are categorized as being overfished. A hundred and seventy countries are left with unmet demand for seafood. On top of that, expected demand is still expected to increase by 30%. If we keep going down this path, it’s estimated that our oceans will be out of fish by 2046. So, there is a huge need for somebody to intervene and come up with actual true solutions that can benefit our oceans, that can benefit our growing population. On top of everything that we need with ocean health, there’s also a global population expected to increase by 2 billion. We’re approaching 10 billion people on this Earth by 2050, and current methods of agriculture, animal husbandry, aquaculture in general just can’t support this growing demand for our food system. I think that is part of the reason why I felt called to make the change. So I’m focusing on seafood; one, because there’s a real need and there’s not a great substitute out there, yet. And as I was experimenting and testing with products, I came across something that I thought was a really exciting version of one product. We brought on our scientific team, we’re bringing on more help, more scientist, as we speak. And right now, we’ve got a great MVP product that’s out there being tested and tried, but I think seafood, in general, is just a white space. There’s not a lot of people doing it, especially when it comes to those whole cuts. There’s a need, and I just really wanted to develop a product that could fit that need.

John: When you started sharing your vision with potential retail outlets and restauranteurs, what’s the response been? And what do you foresee once you get to go to market in terms of getting your great product into the hands of consumers?

Anne: Thank you for asking that question, too. It’s really fantastic. Honestly, the market response has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s really exciting. We’re speaking with every large multinational corporation you could think of. It seems like, right now, we have a lot of excitement in the US, but where we’re getting the most excitement is internationally. I think part of the reason for that is about 70% of the world’s seafood is consumed in Asia, and seafood is the number one most consumed protein per capita over there. When you start looking into a population that is growing, and its number one protein that is being consumed is dwindling, you’ve got the present need is just more in the light. And so, you see it more, you want to act more. And because of that, when these companies, and these corporations, and these population sees what it is that we have out there, they are reaching out, and they want to talk with us, have a conversation, and they’re trying it. When they try it and taste it, that’s when we really win them over.

John: Got it. When you started the company, where did you go out as a young entrepreneur, and share your vision, and start raising capital from? How did that go? Because that’s always a challenging part of being a young entrepreneur without a huge track record behind you. Now, you came out of finance, so I assumed you knew how to put together a business plan and also put together spreadsheets and forecast, but how did that work in terms of raising capital?

Anne: That’s great. You’re right. I do have that finance background, which I think helped a lot because I could understand what I needed to know and what I needed to have in place prior to beginning the fundraising process. At the same time, I’m a second time founder. And having that experience, knowing what to do, what not to do, knowing and understanding how to put together product roadmap, what we need to do, why we need to focus on food service, why we need to focus on retail, how we’re going to bring the two together in order to have a strong action plan. I think being able to put all that together is significant and impactful when it comes to our sell story. However, I also want to say that when I first first started it, my co-founder, Brittany Chibe, and I, we got accepted into a business accelerator. Big Idea Ventures had a New Protein Fund. So they invested in us and they put us through their accelerator program. And kudos to them because I think it was a really valuable opportunity and experience for us. But as we grew our company, that initial investment really helped us to put the right pieces together in order to create a really strong product, really strong opportunity.

And then, we started to get a little bit of early press and then we started to speak on to more panels. And we’re a part of Future Food-Tech. Alternative protein had like a pitch day, they were really great for us. And then, we spoke and did a pitch slam for Good Food Institute. And my goodness, Good Food Institute what an amazing resource for anybody in the alternative protein space or anybody just interested in learning more; they’re free resource. I think all these, just having access to all these people, and opportunities come together, and really helped us to amplify our message.

John: For listeners and viewers who just joined us. We’ve got Anne Palermo, she’s the co-founder and the CEO of Aqua Cultured Foods. To find Anne, her partner, and all of the great work they’re up to, go to www.aquaculturedfoods.com. And you are right now in the scaling phase. So you’re trying to not only hire food scientists and microbiologist, but you’re also looking for chefs and restauranteurs out there that want to test your product, is that not so?

Anne: That is, that is. Yeah, so we’re excited because we’re trying to bring together a really strong scientific team, a really strong team of culinary scientists and chefs, in general, because we’re doing a lot of really exciting, cool R&D stuff, but at the end of the day, we’re food. And so, we want to develop really fantastically delicious food that’s going to help feed the world sustainably. And the best way to do that is to bring together the best people, that are not only brilliant at what they do, but are really great culture fit. Because we are nice people that like to work with other nice people.

John: But I like that, we’re nice people that want to work with nice people. That’s a great way to build the culture, by the way. I mean, like honestly, gosh, it just says it all. I love your offices in downtown Chicago; the wood, the brick. How many employees do you have currently?

Anne: Right now, we only have four full-time employees. We have some consultants, and we are in the middle of hiring and bringing on a couple of more people as we speak right now. Hopefully, by June we’ll have about 10 hires. So we are very actively searching.

John: You’re very young and you already have success in your past and now you’ve got a big idea, who do you look to for inspiration? Who are some of the entrepreneurs out there that have inspired you, that you hope to follow in their path, and how they’ve not only created a business that works but scaled it, but also been good along the way and kept their reputation in terms of character and integrity on the right side of the street?

Anne: Yeah, well, there are so many people. It’s hard to name any in particular, but let’s see here. Just from reputation only because I’ve never met him, but Ethan Brown seems a really fantastic person. I’m really fortunate enough to know Chuck Muth, who is an incredible man. So he’s definitely an inspiration. He works with Ethan at Beyond. I’m a huge fan of Bruce Friedrich of Good Food Institute. What a guy. Shoutout, hi. But entrepreneurs, there’s so many fantastic, fabulous people, especially when you’re in the alt protein space. It seems like there’s a lot of mission-aligned people that are trying to do well by doing good.

John: Yeah. I sense and I feel, but you tell me if this is a correct statement or not, that it’s not a zero-sum game. They [inaudible] prove to grow, it would be more of a collaborative unity of the alt protein, plant-based entrepreneurs that would sort of want to help push and pull everybody else forward that’s interested in this space, because there’s so much to accomplish out against the other forces that exist. Is that a true statement?

Anne: It is so true. It’s so true. When it comes to, for example, alternative seafood, the oceans is $1.7 trillion opportunity; alternative seafood, in general, is $550 billion opportunity. No one company is going to handle it all. Ten billion people on the Earth are going to eat three times a day. There’s room for everybody, and you know that expression, a rising tide lifts all ships. Well, nowhere is that more true than an alternative seafood.

John: Talk about being a woman entrepreneur in a food tech company, but just as a woman entrepreneur, regardless, what’s the advantages to being a woman in a world that is finally valuing diversity and inclusivity as opposed to 10, 20, 30 years ago?

Anne: Well, you know, that’s a great question. I’ve never been anything other than a female. So I can’t really speak to other side of things. But what I can say is that I’m really excited to be a female entrepreneur because I’m hoping that as I grow my business and as we do more impactful things, hopefully what we’re doing can be an inspiration to other women. And I obviously, at one point, love to mentor young women. I don’t know. I have three kids. I have a soft spot for kids, in general. So I’ll just mentor all the kids, but you know, hopefully to be an inspiration.

John: So you’re a mom and an entrepreneur. You’re straddling[?] two very important jobs.

Anne: Yes, thank you.

John: You were raised and you live in Chicago. I’ve been to your city so many times in my life, I go very often on business. It’s known as a food city. I’m a native New Yorker, another great food city. Talk about the advantages of launching and breaking ground in the old seafood business in a food city, in terms of getting the product both into retail and into restauranteur’s hands. So you can get feedback fast. So you can understand if you’re on the right track. Explain what this means, as opposed to starting this in a more remote area.

Anne: Yeah, well what we love about it is the fact that Chicago has so many chefs that are interested in trying new things. Something that’s new and cool. Everybody wants to be the first to try something and everyone wants to be the first to experiment with it. And when it’s really neat, well, word gets out. Everybody talk with their chef friends, and they talk with their chef friends. So not only is it within the culinary preparation scene and food scene, but also then when you’re talking about individual consumers and end users, as well. It seems like in Chicago, and at New York, and LA, and metropolitan areas are very similar. But I know Chicago best because I live here. But in Chicago, consumers are really excited and interested in trying new things all the time. And to be able to say that you’re among one of the first to try something is really big and exciting, and I think that really resonates with the people that have had the opportunity to try our products.

John: And what’s your vision? Where are you in the journey? When do you believe that our listeners and viewers can start enjoying your great products either in fine retailers like Whole Foods or on Amazon, or in great restaurants in the cities that they live in around the United States and around the world? How long are we away from trying the great products that you’re cooking up for us at Aqua Cultured Foods?

Anne: Yeah. Well, we are going to be starting to do some limited time offerings with selected restaurants this year, but sometime this year. And we’re going to have some sushi products for people to try. We’re going to have some fried calamari for people to try. Some popcorn shrimp for people to try. So, what we’re trying to do is create a range of items, meet the customer where they’re at, provide them with really delicious food that they want to eat. And in order to reach the most people, make the most impactful change, you’re going to have to offer most different types of tasty foods. And so, this type of coming, we can start doing some small world[?] allowed, some small test to different selected food service establishments this year, and can’t wait and have a chance to try it.

John: I can’t wait to have you back on, then talk about the journey and [inaudible] food, Anne. Thank you for joining us on the Impact Podcast. To find Anne Palermo, and her partner, and her colleagues, and all the great work they’re doing, please go to www.aquaculturedfoods.com. Anne Palermo, you’re making a great impact. You’re making the world a better place. Thank you for joining us today on the Impact Podcast.

Anne: It was really a fun time. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, thanks.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loops platform spans the arc of capital, from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps, and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored today to have with us on Green is Good Jan Withers. She’s the National President of MADD, which is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Welcome to Green is Good, Jan Withers.

Jan Withers: Well, thank you very much. I’m so pleased to be here with you today.

John: Well, this is such an important topic, Jan, and we’re so honored to have you on because I hope all our listeners here in the United States and around the world listen to this show today and the important message you have to get out but before we get into all the important work that you do and Mothers Against Drunk Driving do, can you share first how you came to become the National President? Share your story and your journey.

Jan: I sure will. It was over 20 years ago. It was in 1992 when my middle child, Alyssa Joy is her name and she was 15 years old at the time and she was spending the night at her best friend’s home during spring vacation and there were three girls there, all sophomores, and two senior boys came over and her friend, Leanna, had a crush on one of the boys and Leanna’s parents allowed the three girls to go out with the guys. What they didn’t know is that the boys had been drinking and they continued to do so. They had stashed two cases of beer in the woods and so they went to a local pond where the guys drank and so on the way home, the driver, who had lost all of his inhibitions and, of course, all of his reaction time and everything, he was very impaired. He lost control of the car. He was going over 120 miles an hour and the car careened across the road into the woods and as it did that, a guardrail ripped off the right side of the car and Alyssa was thrown out of that right side of the car into the woods so the first gentleman on the scene, this was in ’92 so not everyone had cell phones yet, and so the first gentleman on the scene heard the other kids calling for her and he found her. He went to the nearest house, had them call 911 and he went back and sat with her. I was so grateful to that gentleman for doing that so she was medevac’d to shock trauma and we were summoned and we went there and the surgeon spent all night trying to save her life but at 4:30 in the morning, she died but we were there. I’m so glad we were there by her side. She was unconscious but we were there so as a result of that, of course, I was flattened. I couldn’t work. I really just kind of shuffled from the bed to the couch and wandered around and just the anguish is so intense there aren’t any words to describe it and I really felt like I was going crazy so one day, a friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you call MADD?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t have the energy to be active. I can’t do that. I can’t even function,’ and she said, ‘No, no, maybe they could help you,’ so I called out of desperation and what I found was the most wonderful victim advocate on the other end of the phone and she was so kind and just truly my lifeline so not only did she give me help over the many years but she also gave me hope again that there is life after this and not only life, but I didn’t want to just survive. I wanted to be able to thrive again and so even further down the road, as I began to stabilize, I did want to make a difference and so I started speaking at victim impact panels and those are things that judges will often sentence a first time drunk for having offended to attend one of these and they go and they listen to people who have been victimized, received injuries, had their loved one killed, victims of some kind, in hopes that it will affect them and not do this again and so I began speaking at the victim impact panel and then I also wanted to change the laws. I was angry that our society just accepted this as part of life and it doesn’t need to be part of life. It’s 100% preventable, and so I began working to lobby with MADD to change laws and indeed, I was active in Maryland at the time. Maryland was the only state, along with Oklahoma, that still had drunk driving fatalities, vehicular homicide and manslaughter, as a misdemeanor. It was still a misdemeanor then so that made me very angry and so that was one of the first things I became active with but along the line, during that time period, this driver was actually his blood alcohol content was at a 0.08 BAC and so when we started working hard to get the BAC lowered federally from a 0.10 to a 0.08, I became part of that movement too because Alyssa was like a poster child for that and became very active with that but I’ll tell you what, my real love is victim services and as I received help, I wanted to be able to reach out and help other people across that rocky path and so I became trained as a victim advocate and I spent the best past many years doing that as a victim advocate. I have a support group that meets once a month and just doing all of that. Later on, more recently, I was invited to become a member of the national board and so I did that and became more active with the national MADD and then was elected to this position as President, which is a three-year term.

John: What a wonderful how you took a tragedy and you have triumphed over that and turned it into a tremendous platform for doing good. I just give you so much credit. I really do and your story is as relevant today and maybe the most relevant today because something I want to just step back and ask you about: You said you helped take the 0.10 BAC to 0.08 across America. In a time, here we are in 2013, Jan, where I think one thing that we can all agree upon as a country is that Washington has become more dysfunctional, unfortunately, than ever before and the fact that our listeners have to find hope that there is a power in one person and a group of committed people like you who can work together that can effectuate powerful change in this country still through the government and the political process, I think that’s a sign of hope that we all have to grab onto and realize in this democracy, it still can be done. So many people say I want to help change this. I want to help gun control laws, let’s just say, but I don’t think Washington will listen and it will never get done but here, you came up against an issue that, like you said, historically had been societally pushed under the rug and you turned back the tide and you created a new paradigm and good for you because this has really changed the way we all think about drunk driving.

Jan: It really has, hasn’t it? And, really, it is the combined effort of everyone in MADD across the country. It’s not one person and also, the power to be is that we don’t just go and talk about statistics. It’s about the personal stories and when the legislator, the law maker, can relate to those personal stories and they can put their own family members in that scenario, if they can imagine that, then they do, of course, when they hear the other personal stories, it does affect change and they listen, not that it’s easy. I can’t say that it’s easy. It’s work to bring people on board but you can accomplish it as an organization.

John: Jan, I’m on your wonderful website, MADD’s website, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and while we’re talking here, I’m on it and I urge our listeners to join in and look at it as well, whether now or later today, MADD.org and I’m on the site. Can you share a little bit? Walk us through because there’s so much here and there’s so many points of engagement. If I’m an individual coming to the site for the first time, which I have to shamefully admit this is the first time I’m really spending a lot of time on the site, how do I engage? Because it looks like there’s so many entrance points. What’s the best way to begin?

Jan: I love that website. I really do love our website and it is MADD.org but I think, you know, different people have different areas of wanting to be involved and you know, we are a grassroots organization and so we always invite people to join us and I’m excited because many, many people involved with MADD have not personally been affected by drunk driving but they’re there because they don’t ever want to be and they want to help keep our citizens safe but we can give our time and our talents and also our treasures. We rely on donations and I invite people to go on the website and donate because that is how we move forward but this organization really, we have a three pronged mission. It’s to stop drunk driving, of course, what people know, and the second part is to support the victims of this violent crime and then the third part, which people don’t normally know, is to prevent underage drinking and we have programs and activities in each of these areas so as one of the largest victims services organizations in the United States, which I think many people don’t know, we have over 1,400 trained certified victim advocates across the country but we support drunk and drugged driving victims so you were talking about that marijuana and we want people to know that we support victims of all substance impaired driving and we actually serve one person every eight minutes at no charge and so our goal is to continue to increase the number of victims and survivors we serve and to continually improve the quality of those services and we do that on a local level. You can go on the MADD website and get the phone numbers or the emails of the local MADD and we also have a 24-hour national help line. I love this help line. We launched that several years ago and it is manned 24 hours a day by volunteers, trained victim advocates, who volunteer their time day and night around the country because of course, our trauma isn’t just occurring from nine to five during the day but frequently in the middle of the night and so that phone number is 1-877-MADD HELP and it’s just a wonderful help line with wonderful people. I know many of the volunteers around the country and they’re wonderful people and do wonderful work and then what they do is that they then connect that person the next day with a victim advocate close to them so that they can have the ongoing support and do that physically one on one, you know? And, we’re constantly increasing the numbers. That’s how we measure our success is how many people we’ve served and I think last year, we served over 63,000 people, victims and survivors, so right now, I’m really excited. I just came back from victim services training and we’re working to increase our services to the diverse communities and our underserved populations. For example, in the rural communities, our native American citizens, so we’re constantly working to improve that. John: Jan, you said you have three years. What year are you in in terms of your tenure over at MADD?

Jan: I’m in my second year. My second year, yeah.

John: So, what’s it like? You became the President. This is such a story of tragedy leading to triumph and there can be no greater advocate than you. You’ve lived this and you helped reduce the legal limit in terms of what people can drink and you’re a victim’s advocate. What was your goal going into the presidency and what do you think is going to be your biggest achievement in those three years?

Jan: I’ll tell you what. The thing that I think about as I think about these three years, I really like the expansion of our underage drinking program. A few years ago, we partnered with Doctor Robert Terici, who is a professor at Pennsylvania State University and he has done over 20 years of research on reducing underage drinking and indeed, his research supports what other research says. Do you know that three out of four teenagers say that parents are the number one influence on their decisions about alcohol? We still think we’re powerless against this peer pressure but that’s not the case and what he has done is do research and so we partnered with him and we launched our Power of Parents program and basically, the key to this is talking with our teens in a very positive respectful manner, two way communication, telling them the dangers of it, our expectations that they’re not to do it until after age 21 and indeed, that there are consequences if that is violated but doing it frequently. Very interesting because our kids will roll their eyes and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, you told me,’ but it’s still getting in. That’s the point so what we’ve learned is that by doing this, and we have quick course on it. We have the handbook online and we literally are being able to get to a lot of parents around the country and we are successfully now reducing underage drinking, which I think is very, very exciting so that to me is one of the major accomplishments is our Power of Parents program and they again, is to talk positively and frequently with our kids about that.

John: That’s such an important message that we forget. We forget the influence as adults that we have on our children’s behavior, both good and bad, and I’m so glad you’re saying that and for our listeners out there who just joined, we’re so honored today to have the National President of MADD, MADD.org, Jan Withers on with us and as Jan was saying earlier, if you’re in a crisis and you need their help with their victims’ advocates, it’s 1-877-MADD-HELP and again, it’s MADD.org. Jan, tell us a little bit about you also have some new technology called DADSS.

Jan: D-A-D-S-S. Don’t you love MADD and DADSS? It cracks me up?

John: It does so please until I was preparing for this time with you, I never heard of DADSS. Can you please share with our listeners what this means and what this evolution means with regards to your organization?

Jan: This is the most exciting thing to me in the world because a few years ago, in the early, mid, late 1990s, I was getting frustrated along with everyone else because whatever we did, we were not reducing the number of drunk driving fatalities and injuries across the country and we were working hard and then we went back to the drawing table and looked at all the research and now we totally focus on what research says is the most effective way to do this and so in 2006, we launched our campaign to eliminate drunk. That’s become my favorite word, eliminate. We will see it in our lifetime and so that has a combination of three factors: The first thing is to support high disability law enforcement. We know that the sobriety checkpoints and during the holiday seasons when we have the big advertising campaign, ‘Drive sober or get pulled over,’ we know that that reduces drunk driving by 20%. That’s saving lives right now. The second part is of the campaign to eliminate drunk driving is to require alcohol ignition in our locks for all convicted drunk drivers, not just the high BACs, not just the repeat offenders, but everyone convicted of drunk driving and we know that in states that have that, they’ve reduced their drunk driving fatalities from anywhere in the high 30 percentiles up to over 50%.

John: Jan, wait a second. For someone who doesn’t know about this kind of stuff, explain this to me. There is technology that exists today that if you’re convicted, this has to be installed in your car and the car can’t start unless you blow?

Jan: Well said. That’s exactly right. That’s called an alcohol ignition interlock and so that can be required by their sentence to be installed in the vehicle and so they have to blow in it and once they’re convicted, they cannot have any alcohol in their system. It’s a 0.02. This is punitive but what we’ve learned is that the states that have this for all convicted drunk drivers, many of them have cut their fatalities in half so when we started in 2006, one state had it, New Mexico, and we’ve been working hard and now we have it in 20 states as of this year but the key to really eliminating, my new favorite word, drunk driving is advanced technology and that’s a third part of our campaign and that’s Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, DADSS. They have their own website, DADSS, and this is a wonderful technology. I’ve personally been able to see it, touch it. It’s fantastic and so this will be as a passive noninvasive type of technology that we will be able to have in our vehicles that would instantaneously accurately every single time in a nanosecond, because we’re very impatient people and we can’t wait, so in literally a millisecond, not even a second, it will accurately and precisely detect how much alcohol is in the driver’s system and if they’re at the illegal level, the 0.08 or above, this is based on 0.08, our legal limit, then the car won’t function.

John: Wait a second. I, about six months ago, saw this on television and I thought this was Star Wars.

Jan: It is. It’s cool. It’s great.

John: So, tell me this is so important. When is this coming out and how can we encourage our manufacturers to make cars like this sooner rather than later? When is this coming to market?

Jan: Literally, most of the manufacturers are on board and participating in this. It’s exciting for the Auto Alliance for Highway Safety. They’re part of that alliance and it’s a combination of that along with our government, our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and they are working together for this research and we are going to see this within the next 10 years. The key is that they’re in the second phase of their research now and they’ve narrowed it down to two prototypes and they’re actually being installed, as we talk, into a vehicle to do further testing for all the factors so there are two prototypes. One is touch based and that would be installed either on the start button or on the steering wheel and it will only work for the person sitting in the driver’s seat so that will accurately be able to detect if they’re at or above a 0.08 and the car won’t function.

John: That is so cool.

Jan: Isn’t it? And then the other one is breath based and that would be laser beams throughout the interior of the car, even on the steering wheel, triangulating on the driver and it would as accurately be able to detect how much alcohol is in their system and it wouldn’t function if it was above a 0.08. Amazing stuff.

John: This is great and this is going to help us with so many of the issues you’ve been touching on today; repeat offenders, youth drivers who sometimes don’t have the common sense or developed brains that adults have and things of that such so this is such a leap in technology for the good.

Jan: Yes.

John: So, how do we support this? For our listeners out there that are as amazed as I am and as inspired as I am by what you’re saying, how do we help support this movement with DADSS, DADSS.org? How do we help push this forward?

Jan: Well, we’re always appreciative of people literally just picking up the phone or getting on the email and sending a note to their legislators and their congress people because their people look at those and they count them and they know what they’re saying so to continue the support because it’s not easy to maintain the support because of finances. It’s that simple in today’s society. It’s great to encourage them to continue supporting this and also, become a volunteer and share your time and your talent and your treasures, your money, with MADD because that is the way we actually move forward is with people’s support.

John: Jan, you know, let’s take a step back for a minute and just look at some hard data. In 2011, and this is off of your own website that I’ve been through, 9,878 people, despite all the amazing efforts by MADD and all the progress that you’ve pushed in this country and has been adopted in this country, 9,878 people unfortunately, were still killed.

Jan: Yeah, that’s just amazing and it’s 27 people a day every single day.

John: It’s beyond. This number is hurting my head. This number is astounding to me. Can you share with our listeners some of the biggest challenges? Even though so much of what you just said today is inspiring, makes common sense, is important and relevant for all of us in this great country and beyond this great country outside, we have listeners outside the world, what are the challenges you’re facing and how can listeners out there that are inspired to be involved and help make a change and inspired by your journey and story help you overcome those challenges? What are the challenges? As President, you have great visibility of what’s going on and the head wins in front and the head wins today. What are the challenges you’re up against?

Jan: I believe one of the main challenges is that people believe that this issue has been solved, that there’s such awareness now about designated driver and don’t drink and drive, all of our messages, that we really believe in our country that this has been solved and it has definitely not been solved. One life is one life too many and we won’t stop until there are no lives lost to drunk driving and no one else injured by drunk driving but people really do believe that it’s been conquered and it has not. Like you say, 10,000 lives, and so that’s a challenge to me is because I hear that frequently.

John: It’s a great point, and I think that’s spot on, because honestly, I thought you had fixed it almost and I’m learning so much today and I’m sure that’s for our listeners the same. Keep going. I’m sorry.

Jan: Oh, that’s really true and that’s important to know and so you know, we do rely on our volunteers and our supporters so people really can go on the website and they can call MADD, 1-877-ASK- MADD. You know, we make it easy and say, ‘I would like to volunteer,’ and there’s all these different avenues that I talked about; preventing underage drinking and providing help to other people who’ve been victimized by impaired driving and working hard to go to our legislators and our congress people and tell them what needs to be done and tell them you expect for them to do that because you vote for them. We need your support. Any way you can possibly help us is extremely important and that is a challenge. All the nonprofits around the country, with a result of the economy, have suffered and certainly MADD is no different and we have suffered as a result of the economy and so we are a grassroots organization and we really ask you to do what you can to support us because we are busy working hard to save lives.

John: How long ago was the DADSS launched and did that whole game changer come into play?

Jan: Actually, they launched, I believe eight years ago but you know, I’m not positive on that but really, eight years ago and it really is a game changer. It’s very, very exciting. It really is because no matter what the awareness, and really there’s no excuse today. Everybody in the country knows. We’re bombarded with drive sober or get pulled over and designated driver. We know not to do that and yet, people still do and so this technology is really a hope. It’s going to be the hope like seat belts and airbags and the stabilizers for the vehicles, how they have become a regular part, the anti lock braking system. That’s what I was trying to think of and the seat belts and the airbags. Those things have become so standard and have saved so many lives and so this will too. John: If you were to guess what will happen when this technology goes in, and you said it’s going to be within 10 years, so let’s just hope that it’s even sooner. Let’s say it’s five years from now. What does that number look like that we talked about earlier from 2011? Does that go in half when this kind of technology goes in?

Jan: Well, it’s projected when it’s fully implemented that it will save about 8,000 lives a year. That’s what their projection is. That’s a lot of lives so that in combination with the other factors will really make a difference and technology is doing a lot in our vehicles. It’s just amazing what the cars do now that we never even imagines and so this is just the beginning.

John: You know, Jan, I have a strong wife and I have strong daughter and obviously, you are a perfect example of this. I really think that this generation, your generation and beyond, that it’s just become a woman’s world. There’s very few glass ceilings left. Maybe the presidency is the last one and maybe that’s even going to be broken in the near future. Only time will tell but Mothers Against Drunk Driving shows again what the power of committed and amazing people can do together but what happens to dads? Are dads welcome in and is this part of the culture there? Because I’m sure there is many despondent and horrified and saddened and destroyed dads that lose a loved one in this process and are they part of the whole process as well?

Jan: They are so much a part of it. In fact, our President before last, a good friend of mine, Glenn Birch, was the President and a wonderful man. His little boy baby 3-year-old was killed by a drunk driver, but there are as many men in MADD as there are women and not just dads, but brothers and sisters and friends and people who haven’t been affected personally yet but great organization of everyone. My husband is very, very active with our local MADD and he speaks at the victim impact panels and he’s on our state advisory board for our Maryland MADD and what he says is, “When I go out and speak, I take Alyssa with me.” That’s what he says and I love that and there are so many fathers that are doing just that.

John: We have about two minutes left and I want you to be able to wind up and throw some shameless plugs out there because MADD deserves that but before we get there, can you take us to where you are today? How many children and grandchildren do you have, just so our listeners can hear how your life has evolved?

Jan: My husband, Joe, and I have five grandchildren and five grandchildren, actually, so our lives have evolved. All of our children are grown and all are married. No, that’s not true. I lied. Listen to me. One is not married, but he is grown up, but anyway, they’re wonderful. We just have wonderful kids and the greatest grandkids and so the oldest grandchild is 23. Be still, my heart, and the youngest is almost 5.

John: You have a full life, Jan Withers. You have a full life. Okay, so we’re down to a minute. Please give a couple shout-outs for people who want to get involved and join this very important organization.

Jan: MADD just invited everyone to be involved. Feel free to go on our MADD.org website and find out how you can become involved with MADD and feel free to make a donation on that website but you can volunteer in any way that you want but you know, the most important thing, if I say it a million times, I won’t be saying it enough, is the best way to be safe is to not drink and drive so if your activities are going to include alcohol, make sure you decide before you ever go out, before you ever have that first drink, how you’re going to get home safely with a designated non drinking driver.

John: Perfect. Well said. It’s MADD.org and it’s DADSS.org. Jan Withers, it was an honor and privilege to have you on our show today. The world truly needs more true leaders and heroes like you and you are truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. It is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business, properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIdirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so honored that with me, a good friend, Jason Gates. He’s the CEO and founder of Compology. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Jason.

Jason Gates: Thanks for having me, John. Glad to be here.

John: Hey, you have such a great brand and you’re doing so many wonderful things. In fact, you have a great story from yesterday to tell us today. But before we get talking about Compology and all you’re doing there. Can you share a little bit about the Jason Gates background. Where you grow up? Where you get educated and what really inspired you to get to where you are today?

Jason: I grew up in Westchester County, New York and I thought that I wanted to work in construction. I went to school to be a civil engineer and build infrastructure projects, like bridges, and tunnels, and roads. I thought that stuff was really interesting. When I took my first job out of undergrad, I was working for a construction management firm. Building the Second Avenue Subway line in Manhattan, which was incredible. As the lowest man on the totem pole, my job or part of it was managing the waste coming off of our construction project.

John: Oh, kidding.

Jason: What was supposed to be a part part of my responsibility ended up becoming a full-time time commitment, because the tools that I had available to me we’re pretty limited. It was an excel spreadsheet, footboard, or cell phone. We had construction project that was 60 blocks long. We had shifts running 24 hours a day, producing waste. We had different material streams that needed to be disposed of in different places, and of course, different vendors that we needed to coordinate with coordinate service, coordinate payment, get manifest and wait tickets from the waste that they were removing the site, and keep that all organized. When I live that experience of how painful that job was, it shouldn’t have been my full-time responsibility.

John: Yeah.

Jason: That was what really inspired me to say, there’s gotta be some technology that we can bring to the waste and recycling industry that can make it operate more efficiently.

John: You know, being a native New Yorkers. Well, I grew up on the queen side, you grew up on the Westchester side of New York was recycling or waste, or waste disposal prior to your Second Avenue Subway experience, part of your growing up was Westchester a green community ‘cause I’m not that familiar with Westchester except doing business up there and things of that such for growing up. Where there extra bins at your house or not really as part of your culture and family life growing up?

Jason: Growing up, we always had a blue bin for commingled recycling. We always had separate paper stream that got collected. I think my parents because they were very diligent about rinsing every jar and every container before putting it in the bin. The way I earned some allowance growing up was taking out that recycling in the trash once a week.

John: You already had a little experience for mom and dad and where you were growing up, and then it became a bigger experience as a rookie on the Second Avenue Subway line. Got it.

Jason: That’s right.

John: So where do things go from there? So now you have a little bit of aha moment, having to get rid of this very diverse waste stream all the debris [?]. When did you start walking towards becoming an entrepreneur then?

Jason: I was having a conversation with a very close friend of mine, Ben Jabar, who he and I went to high school together. We remained close friends. When we went to undergrad and into our professional careers. Ben is as far more technical than I am. He’s into the nitty-gritty of the actual technology. It was really his idea when I started sharing some of the frustrations out of having in my day-to-day job to say, if we put a sensor on some of these dumpsters, and tracked where they’re located, and how full they are, and things like that, we can totally change the way that you would have to do your job.

John: So then that discussion starts and you’re trying to figure out how to make waste disposal more efficient. When if you both sit down and how did you sit down? Was it over the phone, over a beer and say, “Let’s just do this. Let’s just jump off the cliff together and figure out how to build the airplane on the way down.”

Jason: Yeah. I credit my co-founder Ben a lot for being the catalyst here. He was actually interested in changing jobs. He was the one to say, “Hey, can we take this idea that we’ve been working on and can we make it a full-time thing? He was the one who convinced me to leave the corporate job, and the salary, and take the plunge, and we actually ended up both moving back in with our parents in Westchester.

John: What year is it?

Jason: This is in 2012.

John: That’s great. Then you started, where was the office in your garage, his garage, your home, his home, or how did that work?

Jason: Whoever’s refrigerator had leftover food in it, that’s where we work.

John: I love that. I love it. That’s wonderful. So, I’m on your site now, Compology, www.compology.com. Compology.com. For our listeners and viewers to find Ben, to find Jason and all the great work they’re doing. So, when did you put the business a real business together? I knew you had something and launched Compology and the mission that you have today.

Jason: The first couple of years that we were established as a business were actually trying to find what was the right product market fit. We knew there was something there in terms of introducing technology into the waste and recycling industry. But, it wasn’t really until about 2015 that we recognized the power of putting a camera inside a dumpster. What we do today is build a waste metering system. This is what we install in commercial and industrial dumpsters. The camera that you can see it fits right here in the palm of my hand.

John: Yeah.

Jason: We’re now on the 13th generation of this camera. Fourteenth generation is going into production later this year.

John: Wow.

Jason: What this camera does is it’s taking pictures several times a day as a dumpster fills up. We send those images up through the cell network to the cloud where we use our artificial intelligence to automatically determine how full the dumpsters are, when they’re being serviced, and a content analysis of the types of material that are going inside the container. So, the idea is we can use these data points to meter waste similar to other utilities just like you might meter your water consumption. Your electricity consumption, your natural gas consumption. For businesses and cities to help them save money and reduce their carbon footprint.

John: Love it. From ‘12 to ‘15, when you guys were sitting in each other’s kitchens working on this idea together. How many iterations did it take and to get you to that aha moment with the camera that you just held up in ‘15 to realize, this is the way you wanna go, and this can be commercially scalable in a real business?

Jason: We started by actually thinking that we were going to build a full dumpster that was outfitted with different kinds of technology and focus specifically on collecting food waste. We thought we had some nifty ideas on how we could extend the time between collection events for food waste. So, it could be picked up less often, save money on collection costs. That involved an ultrasonic sensor to measure how for [?] the smart dumpster was gonna be. It was in late 2014 early 2015, that we started to think about, hey, could we take that sensor out of this smart dumpster and just retrofit into any commercial dumpster. Any dumpster that was larger than two cubic yards used for landfill garbage, recycling, compost, scrap metal, textiles, right? Doesn’t matter what the actual material stream is. Once we had that moment of clarity to say that the sensor was actually kind of the core value of what we were developing, we realized that ultrasonic sensors had a pretty limited data stream that they would provide us. It was just a distance measurement, how far from the sensor to whatever’s closest.

John: Hmm.

Jason: It was Ben who said, cameras are coming down and cost rapidly.

John: Right.

Jason: The technology around image processing is scaling every year. Why don’t we put a camera in the dumpster and take pictures. Analyze those pictures to determine the fullness, the service, and be able to do things like a content analysis. It took us seven iterations of the camera before we got to the– or seven iterations of our sensor.

John: Right.

Jason: Before we got to the camera idea, and then…

John: So, now you have the camera idea, you believe you have a business. Now, let’s talk about the necessary evil of capital.

Jason: [laughs]

John: How did you guys start? How did that start happening in terms of raising capital? So you guys can actually move out of mom and dad’s house, homes and have a business. Have a real business.

Jason: Our first capital raised, I joke around with Ben on time. I sold my 2006 Mazda for $9,000 and that was our…

John: That’s good.

Jason: I got a good deal on it.

John: That’s awesome.

Jason: That was our seed capital. We really started by putting everything on personal credit cards. We applied to a couple business plan competitions, and we’re fortunate enough to win small amount of money from those competitions. That really helped fund the early development. But once we found out the power of putting a camera in a dumpster, we went out to go sell a couple of contracts before we even had a product that was finished.

John: So smart.

Jason: It was companies like Google, which they were one of our first customers and they’re still a customer today. They took a bet on us and and signed contracts with us for a product that we hadn’t even built yet. We took those contracts and went to Angel Investors and some small seed stage venture capital funds and said, we’ve got something real here and that became the kind of true seed capital for Compology.

John: How many no’s you get before the yes is started coming in?

Jason: I think it’s in the order of magnitude of maybe 90 or 100 different people that we pitch to. I think what was really interesting was that most of those individuals and firms were interested in the idea. They knew something was there also.

John: Right.

Jason: But they didn’t have the expertise to really determine where we onto the right thing.

John: Yeah.

Jason: We brought on some additional partners, some advisors, and kind of continued building our team and as we did that and continued picking up momentum more and more people get caught their attention.

John: This was the ‘15 and ‘16 and those 2015 and ’16 we’re talking about these years?

Jason: Yeah. So in 2016, August Capital, which is a Silicon Valley. One of the historical Silicon Valley venture funds, they let our series A and that is what really became kind of the first transformational point for the business.

John: You know, raising capital in the space that you chose as opposed to strict SAS technology or other disruptive technologies that have done very well. You were trying to disrupt a legacy industry that had a lot of bodies, no pun intended, and it’s way. The waste industry is tried to been disrupted many, many, many times with a lot of, lot of victims that have been left behind. If both technology and non-technology with well-meaning people, with great ideas. So I even think you were climbing a higher mountain than most entrepreneurs because you’re, it was waste but also technology in waste. Never an easy journey, never an easy journey.

Jason: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting that you use the word disrupt. That’s such a common term used by my peers here in San Francisco and in technology, and we really took the approach that we’re partnering with the waste industry to help advance everybody. I think that mentality has served us really well to build trust.

John: Yeah.

Jason: To be viewed as a subject matter expert.

John: A friend, not a fault.

Jason: That’s right.

John: Yeah. I agree.

Jason: If you’re open to it and you wanna use the technology, we’ll show you how to use it and prove your own business.

John: I love it. I love it. For those who just joined us, we’ve got Jason Gates today. He’s a CEO and co-founder of Compology. To find Jason, and Ben, and they’re great partners in technology, please go to www.compology.com. Compology.com. I’m on your website. It’s a great website. You have videos. You have lots of great information here. Now, talk a little bit about the journey from ’16 to where we are today. How did you prove that out with Google? What other collaborations gave you the traction you needed to take this venture forward?

Jason: Yeah, 2016 and today we went from having hundreds of cameras deployed to now close to 200,000.

John: 200,000. All in the United States right now still. Is this all United states-based?

Jason: United States, Canada and Mexico.

John: Wonderful. Okay, great. Got it. That’s a big [inaudible].

Jason: The offering has certainly evolved over time in terms of the core value that we’re providing. I think what has been particularly interesting, we started seeing it in 2020, came through really strongly in 2021, and into this year in the future and what we’re really excited about is the focus on sustainability. It’s no longer waste metering because I need to save money. It’s waste metering because I need these business critical metrics on how much waste time producing and my carbon footprint related to waste. It happens to be a good financial decision also. I think that’s been one of the key shifts at the macro level that has been an inflection point for us.

John: The transparency and trackability that you give to your client base, is actually two of the key pillars of goodies she-behavior and the shift from the linear to circular economy that everyone’s looking for. So you now have a product that really helps each brand meet goals that they’ve been tasked with meeting that we’re never exist in 4, 5 years ago. He and she in circular economy goals are just really the last two or three years, a new and big thing for the brands that you’re pitching.

Jason: Right. Historically for waste metrics specifically, those had to be aggregated manually. They were typically requested from different regions of the company and each region might report differently. There was no check and balance as to where those metrics were even coming from. So, we’re a third party vendor. We have no financial benefit whether you do well or you don’t do well on hitting your ESG goals. We’re just here to help you improve, no matter where you are. We automate the measurement, the aggregation, and a lot of the reporting to the point where metrics that would be collected once every two or three years are now looked at on a weekly or monthly basis. Are used to drive real business decisions.

John: Jason, I was honored. I had the real pleasure and honor to meet you and your wife last year at Goldman Sachs. Great event where you were honored as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in business models that they were following in the whole world, which is a huge honor for Compology, for you. When we first met, when I was asking you for specifics and examples, one of the great relationships you brought up is your relationship with the city of Miami, what you’ve done there. Can you share with our listeners and viewers what you did with Miami and why that’s such a compelling story?

Jason: Miami really is and we’re excited about that. One of the city commissioners reached out to Compology because Mayor Suarez had set some pretty impressive carbon emissions reduction goals for the city. Miami is particularly vulnerable to climate change, and rising sea levels, and bigger storm events. They wanted to show and actually make tangible progress towards defending themselves on that. So, one of the city commissioners reached out and said, we have this new initiative, would love to understand more about waste metering. That led to a pilot program where we installed at city buildings. This is police stations, fire stations, city hall, Marlins Park, and found that 63% of their containers could have service level reductions that would result in a cost savings of 40% just by sending the truck less often.

John: Wow. So when did you launch in City of Miami and how has it evolved since launch? Has that been the paradigm you’ve used when you talk to other cities across United States?

Jason: We launched in right at the end of September of this year. So when we saw each other in October that was still relatively fresh.

John: [inaudible] up but I asked for example, okay, great.

Jason: It was top of mind, yeah. Now we’re working with the city on changing the city code to require all businesses that generate two cubic yards of waste or more to meter their waste. That’s gonna be pretty game-changing for in carbon emissions of the city. But it’s also gonna give it the city, the view as to where waste is coming from, and how they’re doing against their waste reduction goals, and ultimately divert more waste from landfills.

John: So in terms of potential clients out there, if other cities whereas open as Mayor Suarez was, and is to what you’re doing. They could definitely make a huge impact and their waste reduction goals across United States. Small cities, big cities, Canada, Mexico, and everywhere that right now you are, your cameras should be adopted by cities across United States in the near term. That’s gonna help us get from this linear to circular economy in better shape.

Jason: That’s right. It’s a way to do it in a very cost effective way.

John: Corporations like you said Google, Google is a great example backdating back to ’15. Are you having traction with great corporations and forward thinking corporations like Google as well?

Jason: Our primary business today is selling directly to corporations. We actually work with 1300 unique brands that range in size from, it might be an individual owner-operator of a shopping center, all the way up through Fortune 500’s like, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s, and Starbucks. Multifamily housing operators like, Invesco and Grace Star. Retailers like, Nordstrom’s and REI. So it really spans all different property types. Really the key factor there is, it’s companies that have distributed real estate portfolios.

John: That’s so fascinating. So really sort of the subliminal message you’re sharing here with our listeners is that, business transcends politics and can move faster, hopefully progressive and smart politicians like Mayor Suarez also will join in as he did and he’s got Miami involved, but cities are moving slower than businesses have. But eventually you’re gonna get to the cities to and cities are, of course, gonna move the needle in a massive way with Compology as well.

Jason: Right. I think the reason that we’re seeing that is because businesses are so focused on their bottom line. When we talk about sustainability solutions, the historical stigma has been that, it’s gonna take you 10 years to return your investment on, whatever it is that you’ve installed. Maybe the solar panels you’ve installed. What we’ve been able to very clearly demonstrate into the business model that we use is we can start delivering a 10 to 15 times return on investment every month. Based on our subscription based service, starting at the start of a contract with us.

So, a store like McDonald’s, we can deliver them $7,000 a year per restaurant in savings, which is a 14 times return on investment for McDonald’s.

John: That’s huge. Like you said the numbers are so compelling with corporations, they have to move fast so then municipalities and cities.

Jason: They’re motivated too, right? There’s kind of no reason not to.

John: 14X, that’s wild [?]. I know you shared a great story with me off the air when we started. Talk a little bit, share with our audience the importance of EPA’s national recycling strategy to all of us, not only United States but around the world because many ways as United States goes. So does the world but for the environment, for the future for our children, and for our grandchildren. What’s the EPA’s national recycling strategy look like? What were you doing yesterday that I want you to share with our listeners now?

Jason: So, I had a ton of fun yesterday and I’ll come back to that. But it was the EPA’s national recycling strategy was released in 2021. It is focused on laying out five strategic pillars that guide municipalities and state governments as well as federal agencies in starting to make decisions on how we can develop an economically sustainable domestic recycling industry. For historically, United States shipped a lot of our commingled and paper recycling to Asia. Primarily China. In 2018, the Chinese government stopped all imports of that recycle material, which at times was as much as 30% contaminate. So 30% garbage, 70% recyclables. The US recycling infrastructure was designed to collect sort to that level of cleanliness and ship away the rest, right? So there’s been a period where we’ve had somewhat of a reckoning here to say, well, we need to develop a domestic recycling economy.

So now the EPA has finally come out with its five strategic pillars that help guide decisions towards that end. It’s around, how do we get cleaner recycle material at the source? So at the point of generation, how do we develop markets within the US for that recycle material for reuse? So manufacturing, using recyclable plastic sandpaper. Then the third key piece is around how do we measure? So measure the quality of material coming in, the quality of material going out, supply volumes. I was invited yesterday to speak with the Congressional Recycling Caucus as an expert on specifically the data and measurement piece of that recycling strategy. So how do we use new technologies that are available, that are scalable, that are commercially viable. To really start accurately tracking our baseline of where we are today, and implement measurable programs towards improvement. So we’re talking about how specifically metering of waste can fit into federal recycling policy.

John: When you finish what you did, besides being a very, first of all, it’s a great honor to be asked to do that. Second of all, do you feel like they were receptive and that they that you feel hopeful when that was all over with yesterday?

Jason: I do. I feel very hope I’m excited because I think one it was a bipartisan group and we had folks from both sides of the aisle joining in the conversation and they were very engaged. I think it was both the house and the senate and so we have both chambers there. Again, everybody got it.

What’s most encouraging is when one congressional office chimed in and said, “Well, this is just like water and electricity metering, which we already have regulations around and has dramatically improved the domestic industries around those utilities. So this makes sense. So thank you for educating us because we didn’t know this technology existed.” Was being deployed at scale. So this is exactly what we need to– how we need to have public-private partnerships and really advanced things.

John: That’s so great. How long until those strategies are mandated and implemented? What’s the goals and visions yet there?

Jason: Well, we’ll see. I think the infrastructure bill that got passed is a great first step. There’s some dollars in infrastructure that are gonna help set the foundation. There’s some dollars in the infrastructure built specifically for data collection around recycling and benchmarking. I think that’s a tremendous starts, that’s already happening. Then we’ll see. I think there’s a lot that’s gonna happen in between now and June before some of the members of congress break for midterm elections.

John: Right.

Jason: I think there’s gonna be a lot of activity, but people wanna get stuff done here. It’s happening. I think we don’t have to wait, is maybe more of my point is that people are already taking note and it’s only gonna continue to pick up momentum.

John: Where are you and Ben now Jason? You have a business. If it’s gonna work, it’s working. But then now you’re at that interesting point in the entrepreneurial journey of how big can this be, and how much can we really change the world. When you and Ben sit down and have a drink together, what’s your consensus thinking together on that, on those issues?

Jason: I think we are at we’re just scratching the surface. We get really excited. We actually joke around that every year as we’re getting ready to approach the year in our annual kickoffs. We say this year, we’ve never been more excited than we’ve ever been before. It’s absolutely the truth. 2022 is gonna be tremendous for us. I think there’s opportunity here domestically to continue advancing and whether that’s within waste and recycling, or taking some of the technology that we’ve developed, and help other industries advanced. We have a line of business that we are working on, that is for over the road trucking. How do you measure the efficiency of the utilization of a trailer? Make sure that that trailer is only leaving a warehouse when it really needs to, and when it’s ready to, and not just when a person an individual warehouse worker thinks it should.

So, there’s taking our technology and applying it to different verticals within transportation. Theme there is the same. Let’s build solutions that are gonna help reduce carbon footprint. Help measure sustainability but do it in a way that’s going to have a financial return from day one. We get really excited about that. We get really excited about the opportunity to move internationally and we have some of our big customers starting to say, we have operations in Europe and South America, and we’d like all of our operations to report using the same standards. How can we help you make that leap to Europe or South America. So, those are the big things that we’re excited about here in the next 12 to 18 months, and there’s more to come.

John: Is Ben left Westchester and join you on the West Coast is also, is he still on the East Coast?

Jason: Oh, yeah. He’s here in San Francisco. We remained close friends. Our houses are maybe three quarters of a mile away from each other.

John: How many employees do you have now?

Jason: We’re about 117.

John: Before I let you go, talk a little bit about, not only do you have a great idea you and Ben, and not only have you got it to work. But I know from having many conversations with you, you’ve created a really cool but fun culture. Talk a little bit about the importance of culture and building a great and brand that gets a change the world.

Jason: That has been a really rewarding piece of the experience and something that we spent a lot of time on. It really starts up front with how we’re recruiting and how we’re talking about Compology and it starts with core values, and making sure there’s alignment on those core values. One of the things that is kind of across all, we call ourselves Compologist. So across all Compologist is they get real pleasure out of seeing their work driving around the streets, right? They like seeing the dumpsters behind the restaurants that they go eat at. They think it’s fun to like we’re doing a lot of work with Taco Bell. So we’re doing a team road trip to Taco Bell to the number one most beautiful Taco Bell as voted by, I don’t know who, but it’s in [inaudible] California. But we’re going on a road trip and that’s fun, right?

I think ultimately we work really hard. We hold ourselves to extremely high standards and that reflects in the quality of the product that we deliver to customers. But it also allowed ourselves to be really proud of the hard work we put in and enjoy ourselves when we can.

John: That’s awesome.

Jason: At the end of the day, no matter how hard a situation is, you got to be able to laugh. Got to be able to have a joke.

John: Right.

Jason: Then take that deep breath and go tackle it and that’s everybody that’s part of the team here thinks that way. John that’s why you and I get along so well.

John: As we get along. What I haven’t asked of you that’s important that you want our listeners and viewers to know? Before I let you go, what question did I miss to ask you about the success that you’re having a Compology that you want people to understand about Compology?

Jason: Well, I think one of the pieces that can be intimidating around new technology is not does the technology work but implementing it and changing the business process to utilize the information. The proverbial is the juice worth the squeeze, and…

John: Right.

Jason: I think, this is Compology and new technologies in general have come so far and having that easier out of box experience, right? The ability to deploy across all 50 states within a matter of a month or two, which is what an implementation with Compology is like, is new and it kind of takes a lot of people by surprise that we can implement that quickly, and that it doesn’t require a heavy lift on their side in terms of business process change.

John: Right.

Jason: So this is not implementing new server farms, and this is pull it out of the box and bolt it on, and the system said that configures itself and goes. I think that’s a really common misperception about our technology and many others out there.

John: Right. The technology is complicated. But when you hear all and in your case, your technologies, both not complicated. Then as we talked about McDonald’s, a 14X return on investment, that’s incredible. I mean, the numbers are compelling and the ease of use is also compelling you’re saying.

Jason: That’s right.

John: Awesome.

Jason: That’s right. We’ve done a lot to set up the infrastructure. We have installers in all 50 states.

John: Wow.

Jason: We’ve set it up. So it’s…

John: It is [inaudible] and you made it easy.

Jason: Send us a list of addresses, in a month, you’ll be metering your waste.

John: Wow. That sums it all up. Jason Gates, man, I’m gonna have you back on because this story is, I think you’re at the top of the second any if not at the bottom of the first. You’ve got a long way to go to changing the world, but I’m so grateful for the time you spent with us today. Again, for our listeners and viewers to find Jason and his great company. Go to www.compology.com. Compology.com, JC Gates. You’re making the world a better place. I’m so grateful to you for spending time with us today. I want you to come back on the Impact Podcast to share your journey in the future.

Jason: I’d love too. Thanks for having me, John.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps, and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’ve got a turbo-charged ending to today’s show. We’ve got Tony Schultz and Steve McKinley from Honeywell on with us. Tony’s the Vice President of Honeywell Turbo Technologies and Steve is the Vice President of Engineering for Honeywell Turbo Technologies. Both of you guys, Tony and Steve, welcome to Green is Good.

Tony Schultz: John, thanks for having us. We’re excited to have an opportunity to talk about our business and all the things at Honeywell, particularly around the turbo-charging business and an opportunity to talk to everybody to tell you guys what we’re doing.

John: For our listeners out there, I’m on your site right now and it is not only colorful and gorgeous. I want all of our listeners who’ve got their iPad or some other device in front of them to go to www.turbo.honeywell.com. Before we get into talking all things turbo, Steve, can you share a little bit about your story, your journey, how you got to this very important position at Honeywell leading up to this and the great work that you’re doing?

Steve McKinley: Sure, John. I obviously started like a lot of engineers tinkering with mechanical things, loved tearing things apart and putting them back together to work on a car or a motorcycle, went to college, got an engineering degree, when out of college, started working for one of the automakers and really enjoyed that experience, then decided that I wanted to kind of specialize on some more interesting products and focused in on the turbochargers themselves. I’ve been with Honeywell for about seven years now, with a little more 20-year career in automotives industry since graduating from college.

John: And, Tony, how about you? What’s your background leading up to this important position?

Tony: Most of my career has been in the automotive sector. I’ve been with Honeywell for eight years. I think what really excited about me about Honeywell and all of it’s culture around environmental and the core of Honeywell is really around driving sustainability through bringing differentiated technology to the consumer and certainly, we’re going to talk a little bit about all the things that we’re doing in the transportation segment to make things green and have better fuel economy and have an opportunity for people to improve fuel economy and still have a fun to drive vehicle.

John: That’s awesome, and listen: I love getting in my car and going and I love watching car racing and everything and I’m on your site. Again, for our listeners out there that want to go to the site while we talk to Tony and Steve, it’s www.turbo.honeywell.com. I’m on the site now. It’s gorgeous. I see this beautiful Lamaze Victory racing car here, but before we even get into that, share with me, I don’t even understand what a turbocharger is. What is a turbocharger?

Steve: Yeah, it’s a good question, John. We get that question a lot from people that don’t understand and the simplest form, it’s basically a device that recycles the energy from the exhaust gas that would normally be wasted to power a compressor, which essentially takes fresh air and packs it into the cylinders allowing the engine to act as if it were a much larger engine than it really is. In doing so, we’re able to downsize and improve fuel economy in vehicles by eliminating some of the frictional losses, as Tony said, without sacrificing that fun-to-drive feel.

John: In my mind, a turbocharger sounds like it’s going to use extra energy, but you’re actually saying it’s the opposite. A turbocharger increases a vehicle’s fuel efficiency and performance.

Steve: It does, and there’s a couple different ways that automakers approach things and I think maybe that the paradigm’s shifting a little bit where you used to hear about turbos as a performance option. The automakers are finding ways to say let’s have equivalent performance so that larger naturally aspirated V6 and replace it with a Turbolight 4 and the overall equation is a more fuel-efficient vehicle.

John: Got it, got it; so talk a little bit about what this means for our cars in the United States. There’s been a growth or insurgence of diesel and gas turbocharged engines in the United States is what I’ve read and what does that look like and what does that mean to our environmental footprint and economy?

Tony: The regulatory changes in the U.S., there’s the regulations that have been implemented or are about to be implemented where car manufacturers have to meet a fuel efficiency of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2017. Those regulations will continue to increase through 2025 to 54.5. Turbochargers and downsizing, as Steve has outlined, is a big enabler for the DOEs to be able to be that and currently, turbochargers represent last year about 12 to 13% of all cars produced. This year, we see that increasing anywhere between 15 to 16% and as we look further out into 2018 timeframe, we’re looking at 23 to 25% so if you think about it, it’s about 10% increase and in the U.S., we sell probably about 15 to 16 million cars a year. That 10% increase is an additional 1.5 to 1.6 turbocharges, so the outlook for the business is outstanding for us and again, the big benefit is fuel economy, greener technology for consumers.

John: And, I’m here on your website, which again, for our listeners out there, is turbo.honeywell.com, and I’m looking at what you just were talking about in terms of how your technologies lay over so many different types of vehicles and the sheer numerical value of the vehicles you’re going to be touching so the turbo technology, actually what I’m looking at here is it touches light vehicles engines, both in diesel and in gasoline off highway engines. I’m looking at some sort of farming equipment, highway engines, and racing engines. Am I correct in what I’m actually look at on your website, you’re touching all these segments and more?

Tony: That’s absolutely right, John. With Honeywell, one of the great things is we were the innovators, the leaders, in the industry with the first production application dating back to the ’50s. It started with Caterpillar diesel engines in off highway tractors. It’s a huge part of the business. We have the broadest portfolio in the industry ranging from point eight leaders all the way up to 100-plus-liter large mining truck applications as well so we have a very broad exposure to all different sizes of engines, all different types of applications and different customers as well. It just adds to the excitement of the business and the turbos themselves are very different, whether it’s a gasoline engine or a passenger car diesel or a commercial vehicle engine like you mentioned in the agricultural business.

John: Interesting, and is there other options and things of that such? What other technologies besides these vehicles and those segments and vehicles you just mentioned, where else does turbo touch outside of just vehicles when it says other options and things of that such?

Tony: When we’re talking other options, we get a lot of our innovation from the motor sports side of things and we get a lot of very interesting requests for new innovations and that sort of thing. We’re always working on the next level of powertrain development as well. We’ve got some interesting projects going on in terms of electrification, whether it’s fuel cells or even hybridization. How does the vehicle electrical system interplay with the turbocharger itself? So, we’ve always got our eyes and ears open to developments in new power trains, new fuel-efficiency trends and how does turbo machinery play into that space?

John: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense, so I’m just a general consumer really. I’m Joe Consumer. I love getting in a car and it going and I love it going correctly. What kind of new cars are going to be available with a turbo engine both this year and beyond? What do you guys see with regards to the new car market and things of that such?

Tony: John, we see a lot of new introductions this year. Gasoline downsizing and boosting has been something that’s been hitting the marketplace with cars such as the Chevy Cruze and Sonic, the Fiat 500, Chrysler, Dodge Dart, the Ford Taurus and some of the VW vehicles but this year, we’re also introducing some diesel vehicles in the marketplace. The Chevy Cruze is coming out with a diesel this year, Chrysler, Jeep is going to be introducing a Grand Cherokee, also the Ram. Mazda will be introducing a Mazda 6 with diesel, so we’re seeing a lot of new vehicles that people will have an opportunity to go to the showroom now and get behind the wheel of a diesel to see how it feels.

John: Wow, and I’m on your site and your site’s so good and I’m on the area that says, ‘a greener future,’ and all the great benefits of turbo, fuel efficiency, emissions, and performance, and I love this statistic and please update this for me if need be, ‘Global turbocharging penetration is expected to grow from 30% to 36% in 2016 driven by double-digit annual growth in North America and China,” so this goes way beyond the United States in terms of your macro marketplace so Honeywell think way beyond just North America and the United States. You have opportunities in turbocharging outside of the United States. Is that a true statement?

Tony: Absolutely. We are the market leader in turbocharging. We bring the market about 100 different launches every year. We have about 500 in the pipeline over the next four to five years, so it’s global and we’re able to bring technology to each of the regions meeting the problem statement of increasing fuel efficiency and having people drive vehicles that are fun to drive.

John: If our listeners have just joined now, we’re so excited and honored to have on with us Tony Schultz and Steve McKinley of Honeywell. They’re from the turbo technology division and we’re on their great website as we’re talking right now, turbo.honeywell.com, and we’re talking all things turbo. You know, one of the things that I’ve seen from sustainability when we’ve had guests on from around the world is that typically, Europe and Japan have led on sustainability. The United States is sort of catching up, catching up fast but catching up. Talk a little bit about Honeywell and what you’ve seen in Europe with regards to turbocharged vehicles and how that relates to the United States and its adoption of driving and using turbocharge technology and turbocharge vehicles.

Tony: One of the things in Europe, obviously, the fuel prices are much higher than they are in the U.S. Also, regulations have been stricter in Europe so because of the enabler that turbochargers provide, it has much more penetration. We’re seeing similar things here in the U.S. with regulations and also, as we see fuel prices continue to rise, consumers are looking for options that provide them with more fuel efficient vehicles that they can drive.

John: Got it, and also diesel, talk a little bit about diesel. When I was growing up, I used to see diesel cars and they had heavy emissions and things of that such and I never dreamed I would drive a diesel car or a diesel engine? Is there a growing popularity now in diesel in the United States and what do you think is behind or driving that growth if diesel engines?

Steve: John, you’re correct in that the technology and the advancements that the automakers and engine manufacturers have made in diesel engines over the last 25 or 30 years has been really remarkable. To be able to see some of the advancements in after treatment systems, better turbocharging systems, and just better engines overall, you’d be hard-pressed to know in some cases whether it’s a diesel or a gasoline engine under the hood until you get the feel of the high torque that the diesel delivers so, as Tony mentioned before, that fun to drive and not knowing that it’s a diesel under the hood is really starting to attract a lot more buyers and attention to the automakers and, John, just to add to that, if you look at Europe, every diesel engine uses a turbocharger and when you look at Europe, roughly about 60% of the vehicles are diesel so certainly that shows a success rate and we’re looking forward to seeing how that plays out here in the U.S. also.

John: Got it, got it, got it, and when we talk about turbochargers and diesel, interrelate both of them. As I shared, my past perceptions have been totally off because you’ve just educated me and our audience with regards to turbochargers being better for the environment, diesel having a great place at the table also. Can you share again the intersection of past perceptions versus current realities and where we’re going in the future with regards to sustainability?

Steve: Yeah, it’s a good question and what we typically find is that before vehicle manufacturers or engine manufacturers have embarked on real intensive efforts to improve fuel economy, if they’re replacing a larger, naturally aspirated V6 or a V8 engine, we can see anywhere around 20% improvement in fuel economy with a boosted gasoline solution. That number pumps up to 30 to 35% with a very solid, again, as Tony mentioned, turbocharged diesel engine as well, so the benefits were your standard technology engines are extremely attractive to the automakers.

John: I thank you both, guys. You’re always welcome to come back on Green is Good to talk more about the great work you’re doing with the wonderful and iconic brand, Honeywell. For our listeners out there, to see more of the great work that Tony and Steve are doing, it’s www.turbo.honeywell.com. Tony Schultz, Steve McKinley, the dynamic duo of Turbo Technologies and Sustainability, thank you for coming to Green is Good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people the planet and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast I’m so excited to have you with us today. Young Chang, he’s the president and CEO, and founder of A-Sha Foods. And A-Sha Foods makes these great noodles here, which I’ve already, of course, opened the bag and many, many of these samples, A-Sha noodles, and many other products. Welcome today to the impact podcast. Young, how are you today?

Young: I’m well, John, thank you so much for having me.

John: You know you’re in Los Angeles. Today I’m in Fresno, California. The pandemic, unfortunately still grinds on. But we get to be together and share a little bit of your great background and your entrepreneurial journey. Before we get talking, though, about your great noodles. And what you’ve created here, which I’m a huge fan already of. Can you share a little bit of your background where you grew up? Where did you go to school and where did you work before you decided to take the entrepreneurial jump?

Young: Sure, sure. So yeah, I was born actually in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So, homegrown Product of the USA. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan. They came over during grad school, a typical American Journey to come here, get an education, and stayed here, had a family. So for the better part of my first 12 years, I grew up in the Midwest, in Minnesota, in Rochester specifically.

John: Why did mom and dad choose Rochester? It’s always fascinating given that I’m an immigrant to you or me an immigrant. I’m the third generation. Well, why did your parents when they came over choose Minneapolis?

Young: Yeah. So my parents came over, they went to grad school at actually University of Wisconsin at Madison. So they were kind of in that area. After that, they got a job at IBM. So within Rochester, it’s kind of like Mayo Clinic and IBM, those were the two big, big companies and big operations out there. So they were long. Both of them are longtime IBM employees. So started out and started out in Rochester and then ended up transferring over to the Bay Area to Silicon Valley. So when I was 12, that’s when we kind of made the move out west in the Bay Area, went to high school, middle school there. And then UC Irvine, beautiful Irvine accepted me as an undergrad student. So I went there…

John: The anteaters.

Young: That’s right. So I went to UC Irvine as a computer science major graduated there began my career and then say to go back to business school, joined the USC Marshall School of Business, and became a proud Trojan.

John: So you left your parent’s legacy of being great badgers behind, the anteaters behind and you finally made it over to the Trojans.

Young: That’s right.

John: As many people know, my wife’s a Trojan, my business partners are Trojan. So there’s a huge Trojan contingency here at impact in it. And our company, so that’s great. And you got you you got your business degree over there. And we’re going to work after USC.

Young: Yeah. So I mean, during the time, after my undergrad, I actually started in the tech industry, right back then it was, the year 2000. Tech was booming. So I did my rounds through Cisco, IBM, PwC, as a consultant, ended up joining the Walt Disney Company, working on their SAP systems. And then from that point, I decided that “Hey, I wasn’t the best programmer in the world.” And quite frankly, I was much better at a meeting and talking to people and kind of connecting things and managing projects. So I decided at that point to go back to school and get my MBA. I did my MBA with a focus on marketing and corporate finance. So after that whole experience of the MBA, I ended up leaving Walt Disney Company, I joined Warner Music, and then there on after that, I went and joined Warner Bros. Studios, so all in the Burbank, center of the media, media capital, all that area. So I did my rounds for about 18 years, kind of doing the corporate thing and earning my stripes there.

John: When was that moment during those 18 years, when during that journey, which all, by the way, I mean, you couldn’t work for three or four greater brands, I mean, IBM Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, all amazing and iconic brands. When did you start thinking or dreaming about one day becoming an entrepreneur?

Young: I mean, for myself, as you mentioned, John, like, those companies were fantastic companies, I learned so much there. And I think, setting myself up to run my own business and kind of branch out and do my own thing. A lot of that came from there. I mean, I draw from those experiences so much. But throughout the journey of kind of working corporate, I make kept thinking to myself, all these companies are great, but at that highest of high levels at the sea level, every company’s got like four, right? You got your CEO, CFO, CIO, etc. I was like, for myself, it was just a numbers game for me to get to that level, a lot of things need to align for that to happen, versus maybe coming out doing my own thing, I’m kind of there from the beginning. But again, I have all the risk, and I have all the pressure, but I’ve got all the rewards as well. So that seed was always kind of in my head, and I guess I just kept, I just kept learning and kept leveraging my superiors and learning from the companies that I was working for. And when the right opportunity presented itself, I was ready to make the jump. So I kind of stumbled into it.

John: So, there are so many things, given your unbelievably impressive education, all great schools, and also your work experience. I’m sure you saw so many different industries that you considered that you could go and disrupt or go and become a part of and become an entrepreneur and why noodles. Why did you decide to start A-Sha Foods? And what was the aha moment without trying to be cute for our shop?

Young: Yeah, I mean, I always say like, I feel like noodles chose me versus I chose noodles. So okay, what happened was, so I have a brother in law of mine who’s kind of like a mentor. He’s a very successful businessman in Taiwan. And he’s done a lot of different business ventures primarily in retail, he owns shopping malls, real estate, that kind of thing. He decided he wanted to get into the food business, there was a company called Asha foods, which was a legacy brand in Taiwan since 1977. It’s been around and had run into some problems in terms of product quality, there were some issues, some recall issues within Taiwan. So long story short, that company, which was very iconic in Taiwan was about to go under. So my brother-in-law actually went in invested in the company, and kind of saved the company from going under, because he didn’t want to see a very traditional legacy brand from Taiwan go under. So he kind of went in financially, made the right investments to be able to recover. And as he started putting more and more time and money into this business, he started realizing that, “Hey, there’s something here with this product.” And what we make is actually not something that’s very earth-shattering. It’s very traditional. The recipe that we use for our hero item is 100 years old. It’s a recipe that’s always been around. But it’s something that was never brought to the Western market, it was always kind of in Chinese culture, in Taiwanese culture.

So he saw this noodle and then, I would go back to visit family, do the kind of holiday thing. And he would always have me come over and say, try this noodle-like, what do you think? Do you think we can sell in the US all this stuff? And I was like, “I’m not sure about it. Nobody in the US because I grew up here. I’ve never seen something like this before.” But as I learned more about the product, how it is air-dried, not fried, you get a better you get less fat content, no MSG, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, like it’s, it’s like flour, salt, water, soy sauce, sesame oil. That’s it. That’s really what we built our business on those five ingredients. And it was there all along. All we had to do was bring it over. And I think where the magic happens was we had a great product. And it’s something that the, I’ll just say the American market was looking for, which is a high protein, low fat, natural ingredients. But we had to repackage it and present it in a format where it’s more acceptable for different cultures because coming over from Taiwan, it was all in Chinese. Nobody could read it. They didn’t even know all the benefits of this product.

John: Okay, so let’s step back here. How many brothers and sisters do you have?

Young: Biologically, I’ve got an older sister and I got a younger brother. Through my marriage, I have a brother in law sister in law, about four or five.

John: So is this your brother-in-law through marriage or through your biological siblings?

Young: Through marriage.

John: Through marriage, okay, so this is your brother-in-law. He lives in Taipei in Taiwan, or he lives in America.

Young: No, he lives in Taipei.

John: He lives there. Now he invests. And now he shows you this. When does that discussion start happening, like maybe you should be running this?

Young: Yeah. So I would say took over the course of probably two, three years. And then finally, he just kind of said, “Look, you just have to try it.” So bring something over, sell it online, sell it on Amazon, do whatever you do in your techie world, right? I did that. I brought it over, listed it on Amazon, sold it on a website, sold it out. “Okay, so order some more.” Listed online, sold out again. And then it’s like, “Okay, bring in more and more.” And I think after about two and a half years of doing this, we kind of were like, “What are we doing?” Like, I’m working nine to five this business that’s after 5 pm continues to grow. Why not focus and go all-in on this? So back in 2015, we made the decision we’re like, “Let’s incorporate this, let’s create A-Sha Foods USA. And let’s do this right, and let’s bring in products. Let’s build a team. Let’s get marketing branding.”

John: Visualize it, you’re gonna present you’re gonna make a real business of it. A-Sha Foods in Taiwan, how big is that an order of magnitude over there?

Young: Well, in our world, in our noodle space, we’re definitely one of the top three. When it comes to dry noodles, we’re number one. So the other kind of deep fry those types of varieties. They’re still there. But in our category, yeah, we’re definitely number one. So anyone from Taiwan that’s living in the States or living in Australia, or living anywhere else, where we distribute every time when they see the A-Sha brand, it’s like a letter from home. They feel like right, something authentic is there.

John: What a great thing you and your brother-in-law, get to literally take over an iconic brand from Taiwan, and bring a taste of Taiwan home here to America to the Asian American community here.

Young: Absolutely. I would only equate to something like a hostess. Right? So if you went to France, and you saw a Twinkie, that’s something from the US.

John: Or frankly, the truth is, it’s like what Americans feel like when they go to any country now in the world, and there’s a Starbucks or McDonald’s.

Young: There you go. Yeah.

John: Same thing. It’s a comfort brand. That’s right. You feel safe. You feel like, “Ah, this is a taste of home here.” That’s amazing. So now, when did you launch Asha USA with your brother long the United States?

Young: That was 2015.

John: 2015. So now explain what the game plan was then? And how did it play out the last seven years? Like the game is always a game plan. And there’s always how it goes. And typically, there’s somewhat different than then how you usually startup?

Young: That’s right. That’s right. So, as I mentioned, we always felt that we had a good product. But the thing that we felt that was different from us and other noodle manufacturers was that both I and my brother-in-law, which was kind of like the brain trust of this company, both of us were not from the food industry. So right when we came into the food industry, everything that we did was different, like, the way we looked at our products, the way we looked at our branding was completely different. So we felt like That was our biggest strength that everything– because the food business, in many ways is very traditional, very, very legacy base. And, there’s a certain way things are done. But the way we came in was totally different. I mean, with our collaborations with like, Hello Kitty, BT21, Momofuku, we do all these different collabs. I mean, normal noodle companies are not really doing these kinds of things, because we’re trying to actually create a brand more so than create noodles.

John: Well, it’s not only that, that’s makes so much sense. But you also weren’t constrained by any legacy notions of the food industry. Since you both weren’t food executives. You’re a business person.

Young: 100% Yeah, that’s right.

John: It’s so exciting. And let me just say something couple of things I want to do. You say whenever I try someone who’s coming on impacts food, I always share it with my granddaughter Colette, who’s 19 months old. This she saw this in my pantry. You were kind enough to send me a few of these samples. And she was immediately drawn to this design. And then I cooked some of this up for her. And she loved it now 19-month-old children, they don’t have biases, they don’t have any, you know, they don’t know what’s going on in terms of you’re coming on the show or anything. She just knows if it tastes good or not. And she just loved it. She loved your product. Not only that, I love it, but she loved it. To me, that’s a true taste test. So I’m telling you, you’re onto something big here. And these, and the way you’ve co-branded these cups, and then the taste of these noodles that with the dressing, just literally incredible.

Young: Thank you so much.

John: Yeah, really. So how many product lines have you developed in the last seven years? And how are things going?

Young: Yeah, so we kind of came in with the base dry noodle, which is the clear one that you just held up, that was our base one that we started with. Since that time, we must have released about 15 or 20 different items. And I mean, the market is always changing. And for us, it’s like the noodle, the base noodle, the same quality, the same principles that we stand for, we always incorporate new products, but we always look for ways to tap into new markets and tap into new audiences. Because a lot of times, I feel like, food may be foreign to someone, but with the right packaging with the right wording, it can kind of make things less intimidating, and for them to be willing to give it a try. And I think, for the most part, everyone that’s tried our noodle, has liked it because it’s very neutral. I mean, even the flavors that we pick, we didn’t bring in the most aggressive Taiwanese flavors, we pick the ones that were almost universally accepted. And luckily for our company, they had me who is a very Americanized palette. So I kind of know what is acceptable and what works. And versus now we’re trying to bring in some of the Wilder flavors and some things that are even more exotic to this market.

John: Right, right. Are the two trends, tell me if these two trends are the wind at your back in helping you? Obviously, Asia has been a big mystery to Americans, for time immemorial, still is, most Americans, a small amount of Americans have passports to start with only 39 to 40%. And most of those Americans have only been to Canada, Mexico or South America or Europe, very few have been to Asia. So one, there’s been a huge influx of Asian food to America and this and this new sort of like opening up of this jewel box of delicious tastes that come from Asia. Plus, there’s also the huge plant-based eating movement that’s been going on for the last 8 or 10 years, lead by impossible and Beyond Meat and just eggs and all those other great brands. Are those two macro trends, great wind at your back as you continue to build this brand?

Young: Yeah, 100%. I think the timing is always very critical, especially in business. And I think, in recent years, as China has opened up more Chinese immigrants are coming to the States or overseas students, there’s more exposure. And I mean, I think it’s very consistent when we talk to any of our buyers, the largest growing category within all of their retail channels is the Asian category. So they are all trying to double triple down on Asian products. Because to your point, there is this curiosity about Asia, I think the consensus out there is that ages kind of this mysterious thing, but there has been some exposure to food and the food, I think, it’s been kind of training wheels, but it’s good, right? So I think as people are exploring more and more when you talk about beyond Panda Express right into the Romans into the Vietnamese first, there’s more to explore, I think the food has a lot to offer. And something that’s very interesting, which kind of coincides. Two points are that Asian culture is heavily Buddhist, and there’s a very vegan and vegetarian religion, right. So a lot of the food products naturally, inherently are vegan vegetarian. So I think Asia can bring a lot of those types of foods over.

John: I’m going to tell you, I’ve been a vegetarian, as most of my listeners and viewers know, 40 something years that a be plant-based, plant-based eating person for 14 or 15 years, I ate your noodles, they are so clean and so, so delicious. At the same time, I was shocked at how great they were. I mean, just indigestible, and they just make you feel strong. I mean, so now, where, where do you go from here? Where are you selling predominantly? And how do you want to continue to grow your brand, both in categories? And also in positioning in terms of chat sales channels?

Young: Yeah, I mean, I think as far as the branding goes, I mean, the work is never done, there’s always more and more people out there that don’t know the brand. I’ve never heard of it. So, we continue to build the brand, we continue to emphasize the main points, transparency, quality, all those factors that were always at the core of our business, and the noodles are leading the way because the noodles are what we’re known for, that kind of opens the door for us. But on the tail end of that, we have so many new products that are being developed because the noodle has been successful. And because we’ve earned that trust with customers in our retail buyers, they’re willing to look at our other products. So as we start to continue to develop, I mean, I feel like our brand is becoming more than just a noodle company, we actually trying to position ourselves like impossible, like beyond more like a food tech company.

John: That makes sense. You’re a tech guy. So it makes sense. You take the tech. And that makes it that makes really a lot of sense.

Young: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the thing is like, as the world is continuing to evolve, environmental issues, the animal rights issues, right, so we’re definitely leaning more towards vegan products. And, we have new products that expand not only within the noodle category, but we’re going to be launching an instant pasta very soon as well. So now you’re going to have a pour hot water into a container and you’ll be able to eat marinara-based sauce or carbon airbase sauce within five minutes. So, those quick meals, meal solutions, that kind of thing. And we also have a fresh development, a vegan egg product that’s coming on the market. And that I mean, the egg market is huge, but there are so many issues with the environment and people that are allergic and, vegans that cannot eat dairy products. So we feel like we’ve got an opportunity to really make a dent in that market.

John: Not only vegans that can’t eat dairy products but people who eat generally, middle of the road type eating who should be eating more plant-based because the science proves that if you eat plant-based, you’re just going to be somewhat healthier. Yeah, so what’s the egg? Do you have a name for the egg yet?

Young: So we’re kicking around a few names right now. For now, we’re calling it an A-plus egg. But yeah, we will have a name and a brand very soon.

John: Wonderful. And for our listeners and viewers who want to learn more about Young Chang company and A-Sha foods please go to ashadrynoodle.com. It’s an amazing website in terms of colors, in terms of food photography, in terms of description of all the great products that they sell, and young cells. Young now talk about this. Now that you have a fascinating thing going on. A-Sha exists in Taiwan as a company, right?

Young: Yeah.

John: And now, since 2015, here in the United States.

Young: That’s right.

John: How many of the products are that you’re selling a year? And you do well here, do you then start marketing there? And vice versa. And how much cross-cultural business Intelligence Do you share with each other? And that you decide then to market to the different population bases that you both are serving?

Young: Yeah, that’s a great question. So when we first started, we probably had about 35-40 different skews that we sold in Taiwan, coming over, we brought only 8 over. Okay. And so since that time, we’ve been developing new products suitable for the US and more international market, right. And, quite frankly, because our volume and our sales outside of Taiwan have become so predominant. Taiwan now actually takes, they take basically the lead from we they take the lead from us, basically.

John: Basically, you’re doing the R&D now for the rest of the world.

Young: That’s right. And so products now that are successful in the US actually have a better chance of succeeding in Taiwan, because they have notoriety outside of Taiwan.

John: I don’t want to know numbers, because that’s none of my business. But in terms of volume, how far are you away from your revenue eclipsing Taiwan’s revenue?

Young: I think we’re very close. Because as a company here, we average about the large 40-foot shipping containers, we average about 30 per month. We’re getting very close to eclipsing. I think we may have already done that.

John: So now you’re only seven years into it, you’re very young, you have your full of ideas. And it’s working, which is always a dream for entrepreneurs. So now it’s not if it’s gonna work, it’s how big can it be? Where can your vision go now, in terms of the United States, Canada, North America, and around the world?

Young: Yeah. So I mean, since we came to the US, I think the US was first after that, we went to Canada. We’re in Hawaii too, which I kind of count as its own country. Yeah. Hawaii is there, Singapore, Australia, UK. So we’re kind of making our way around the world. Of course, the regions that we’re in, still need a lot of work and a lot of maintenance to continue to build and continue to grow. But we’re slowly making our way around. And I think the biggest surprise to me has been that noodles have been generally accepted all around the world.

John: That is so exciting. And so out. So A-Sha, Taiwan, just sells to Taiwan, your you’re basically A-Sha, USA, sells to the rest of the world in North America.

Young: That’s right. So we’re an affiliate of the home office, but we’re pretty much international. And so for us, Taiwan, China is with home office, and the rest of the world is all us.

John: And now talk a little bit about you and your brother-in-law, are you the two owners of the company? Are there more investors? How does your governance work? And how do you continue to be inspired and learn and grow as an entrepreneur, and as a business person as well?

Young: Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve been very lucky. There are only two partners in this business, and the business is 100% self-funded. So we own the stack, all the way. The entire vertical is all ours. So I think that makes it very easy for us to make decisions like, do we want to deal with do a deal with Costco? Do we want to work with Trader Joe’s, it’s really a phone call here and there. We do have a board of governance as well. But in general, it’s basically like, we have a very flat organization. And I think it’s really that’s all that’s correct. So that’s allowed us to be very, very agile in our approach, and we can do deals quickly, we don’t have a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of red tapes to go through. We can kind of just discuss, and if it makes sense, we can pull the trigger on a lot of things.

John: How often do both of you meet like this?

Young: I talk to him pretty much, two or three times a day, and he’s 15 hours ahead of me.

John: That’s great. And then pre COVID and now during COVID. How did your business change and evolve because of COVID? And as we start to now, come out of COVID and you look back, do you feel that you’re a better company more efficient, and doing more with less because COVID force you to do so?

Young: Yeah, I think when COVID started, I mean COVID, unfortunately, it was a bad thing for everyone. On our business side, it actually was a boom to our business, right because a lot of people couldn’t go out. We had to quarantine for quite some time and So, I mean, sorry, the lockdown. So people were looking for meal solutions and different. So I think people were more willing to explore, and they were more willing to buy food online. So prior to COVID, the grocery online, that business was still kind of in its early stages, it was right dominated by clothing electronics makers. But now I feel like food is like, I mean, that’s the new norm, right? People order products online, get food delivered all the time.

John: Normal.

Young: Yeah. So I think for us, I mean, that was really the thing, which is transitioning our business from a very heavy wholesale business into more of an online DTC model. And I think that’s going to continue on for sure way past COVID. Because now people are used to the convenience. And they’re used to being able to explore and find things on Instagram and say, Oh, interesting shop, now I can buy it. And it arrived on my doorstep in two, three days. So I think that’s now the new challenge, which is, where’s the balance between the wholesale market and the online market, and pricing wise, we used to be able to keep these two things separate. But now the world is much more condensed. So now people are looking at both saying, well, I could walk into my market and buy it, or I could buy it online. Relatively the same price.

John: And you manufacture your dry noodles here in the United States, and the noodles in Taiwan are made over there?

Young: Well, for now, we’re still manufacturing in Taiwan. 100%. We import everything. But there are plans to explore facilities within the US.

John: Yeah, and you’re young. So you also knew the big trends that were coming. So in terms of transparency, and sustainability, A-Sha dried noodles is very focused on transparency, innovation, sustainability, and other key ESG and circular economy type of trends. Is that not true?

Young: Oh, no, that’s 100%. True. I mean, that’s kind of just– I think, for us, I mean, a lot of people growing up in the States, I feel like that’s kind of ingrained in our heads from birth, right. The way we do business, the way we talk the way we look at products, and the way we kind of have to make that emotional connection with products. I mean, that’s one thing that I feel like a lot of international brands don’t always get that you have to make that connection first with the customer. Once you have that connection, you pretty much have them for life. I mean, at least once they believe in the product. I mean, it’s a fragile relationship, right? Because it can go either way. So every step we make always has those things in mind, which is, you got to be open, you got to be honest, and you got to basically present a product that really is what it is, there’s no kind of pulling the wool over the sheep size anymore.

John: Are your mom and dad’s still alive?

Young: Mom and dads are still here. Yes.

John: What do they think of all this?

Young: They thought I was crazy for giving up my 401k and pension plan. But now, I think I want to say I want to hope that they’re pretty proud of what their son did.

John: I’m sure they’re very proud. Do they still live in the Bay or they’ve moved down to Southern California?

Young: Yeah, they’re in Silicon Valley still. The kids are all down here. So they drive up and down, every so often.

John: Yeah, that’s wonderful. When COVID passes, does your brother-in-law come here a lot, and you go there a lot? When COVID’s not happening, are you guys going back and forth a lot?

Young: Yeah, that’s the interesting thing. I mean, we used to travel internationally, maybe five or six times a year. And since COVID, we haven’t moved for the better part of two years.

John: And exceeding in spades. So maybe all that travels a little bit exhausting. And maybe all that travel is not going to be necessary for the future.

Young: Yeah, I mean, definitely, God bless technology. It’s allowed us to be able to continue our business. Yeah. But there is something to be said about that personal touch, giving someone a handshake and a hug. Of course, a face to face is always so important. So I’m so eager to get back.

John: Yeah, I’m with you. Talk about, is it in your line of sight. In terms of growth, that one day I’ll be in the UK or France or Italy, and I’ll be able to have your delicious A-Sha noodles?

Young: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in certain parts of Australia and Europe, that can happen, but we definitely need to make it more mainstream. And it starts with branding, right? Because the more we can get the name out there, the more people start hearing about it, the more awareness that’s when the retailers are willing to give us a chance. But we’ve been very fortunate. We have a great relationship with Costco. So they have locations all around Europe and Australia, Asia, so they’ve been a great partner of ours. We’ve been able to really use that platform to present our products.

John: Sound like financing isn’t a big deal. You have your brother in law and already you’re so successful. But in terms of visibility and becoming a household name. One of the reasons people take their companies public, two reasons. One is visibility. The other is to raise capital, sometimes not in that order. Is that something you and your brother-in-law dream about in terms of, if you really want to become a worldwide household name, taking the company public one day is a possibility?

Young: Yeah, 100%. I mean, that’s something we’re definitely looking at, for all the reasons you mentioned. That’s kind of been a dream of ours. It’s just in the progression of the growth of the business, that’s kind of the logical next step for us. And whether that be taking some private equity, money to bump the valuation, whatever that may be. But I think those are the things that we’re starting to explore. I mean, we started this business, really just not knowing what to expect. And I think now we’re being faced with some of the questions that are leading to much bigger things, but for us, I mean, we’re, we’re pretty simple guys, all we wanted to do is just bring a break, we don’t bring a great product to the, to the rest of the world. And I think we started something and it’s, it’s now our job to keep pushing it and get it out there as much as we can.

John: That’s great. Any last thoughts? When you look back, is there anything you’d inform yourself to your 20-year-old, 21-year-old self, and any other young entrepreneurs that we have a ton of young entrepreneurs from around the world that watch and listen to this show? Any entrepreneurial advice? Now, you’ve got seven years under your belt. Plus, you also had great corporate experience, what kind of advice would you give to those who want to become the next Young Chang, food entrepreneur, or disruptive entrepreneur in any space?

Young: Yeah, I mean, for me, it was always about being super detail-oriented. And I think, it’s easy to say having the courage having the confidence to do something, but I feel like that confidence really comes from really doing your homework and really understanding the situation. Because when you really do that, when you can walk into a room and know that you’re the smartest person in the room, I think you just naturally exude confidence, right. And I can’t say that I did it on my own. Like I said, I had a lot of mentors along the way, I had my brother-in-law pushing me to surround myself with good people, do my homework. And when you have that confidence, have the courage to make the move, because there’s never a right time to do it. I mean, certain times things can come to you, but you just have to go, and but I think my whole trick is I’ve got a son that’s going into college as well. And I basically tell him, “Look, you can be successful, successful at anything you do the name of the game is doing it in the least amount of time as possible.” So you can work your life, and you will be the best, whatever you want to be. But if you’ve got people around you that can help you shortcut it. That’s the way to go.

John: Where’s he gonna go to school?

Young: Still waiting for a few but I’m hoping he’s going to land in one of the East Coast Boston schools or NYU. That’s my hope. That’s my dad’s. That’s one hope.

John: NYU’s a great one. I mean, the boss’s schools are great, too. But if you’re talking to an NYU grad, I think…

Young: Oh, awesome.

John: I think he’d do very well at stern or so. Does he work for as he had all worked for the company while you’ve been building it?

Young: He has. So he’s the one that’s been there all the way.

John: Wow.

Young: He’s seen it from when dad was moving boxes and putting barcodes on products right? Dad is basically, doing interviews with world-famous podcasts.

John: That’s great because my experience, my two kids above me that that leaves an indelible mark on him that will stay with Him forever. And it’s a positive experience that he’ll want to replicate when the right time presents itself for him.

Young: That’s right. I mean as parents all we can do is be good role models and say open when they need but we got to let them kind of do what they got to do. But I put my son through it. I made him work the booths when we had to cook thousands of bowls of noodles and he’s done it all.

John: Oh, that’s awesome. It’s awesome. Well for our listeners out there that want to find these great noodles and are fine with Young Chang and his colleagues, you just go to www.ashadrynoodle.com. Young, I wish you continued success. Keep making huge impacts. I want you to come back on the show and tell us where you are as the journey progresses. I hope all of your dreams come true. And it’s just so exciting to have you on and thanks for sending me samples because my granddaughter and myself enjoyed every drip and drop them they were just delicious.

Young: Thank you so much, John. It’s been a pleasure. Great chatting with you.

John: This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by engage engages a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders engage as the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage, or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored and excited today to have Laurel Moffat on with us. She’s the Outreach of Communication and the Senior Specialist for Southwest Airlines. Welcome to Green is Good, Laurel.

Laurel Moffat: Thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

John: Laurel, talk a little bit about you’re in this great position of messaging for Southwest Airlines. Talk a little bit about how you got here. Was this something you’ve always dreamed about? How many years have you been at Southwest? And, talk about your journey leading up to Southwest.

Laurel: Absolutely. Well, I probably since elementary school, I was always interested in being a journalist or reporter and kind of being a storyteller and so my mom could probably attest to that, but I loved to tell stories and would go on and on, so I actually went to the University of North Texas and I got my Bachelor of Arts in journalism and continued my education to get a master of journalism so put that to use. I did a little bit of media relations at Texas Speedway and did some sales and communication for some other companies and I just aspired to work for a world’s most admired company like Southwest Airlines and so when I started in July of 2007, I just wanted to get my foot in the door because I had heard so much about the culture and how this company puts their employees first and so I actually started out in customer relations answering letters and I was willing to do that just because I wanted to be a part of the cause at Southwest Airlines so as soon as a position opened up in our public relations department, I applied for that and have been in our communication department since January 2010.

John: And, that’s so great because it’s so funny what you just said and a lot of our young listeners out there have to get that. I love how you put that. You just wanted to get your foot in the door. That makes so much sense. A lot of people want to start at some great level or they have big dreams, which is great to have big dreams but just getting your foot in the door is the right step in the direction you want to go and that’s such a great message for our young people out there.

Laurel: Absolutely and you know, working in the customer relations position, I’ve met so many people across the company in different departments. Not only was I able to learn and understand the airline industry but learned to be a spokesperson for Southwest and understand our language because anybody who knows anything about Southwest and our culture, we have our own what we call Colleen’s Bible. Colleen’s kind of the heart of our company and really founded the philosophy behind our customer so we capitalize things like the C in Customer and the E in Employee because those are people that we put first so it was interesting to learn that. I think we probably drive students out there and reporters out there that follow the AP Style, but Southwest has its own style of writing, which we follow.

John: Well, for our listeners out there, first of all, I’m not only a big fan. I use your airlines all the time. It’s an amazing experience. You guys really do put the customer first. That’s number one. For our listeners out there who are not familiar with Southwest Airlines, please, when you have the opportunity to fly Southwest, try them. You won’t ever want to go back. They’re just an amazing airline that really is leading the way in customer service and for our listeners today who want to follow along with what we’re talking about with regards to Southwest Airlines, please go to SouthwestAirline.com and then you can go to SouthwestAirlines.com/citizenship because there’s a lot of great things that Laurel’s gonna be sharing with you today and I’m on that website right now and there’s a lot to talk about so talk a little bit about, Laurel, green. Green and airlines. Typically, those are not mentioned in the same sentence so talk a little bit about how Southwest started in this journey and how hard is it to be green if you’re an airline?

Laurel: I mean, obviously, we say that a lot. It is very hard to be green as an airline. Just last year, our fuel consumption was almost two billion gallons of jet fuel so obviously, it’s hard to do that but honestly, for Southwest Airlines, it’s the right thing to do and it makes good business sense because when we’re more efficient as an airline, looking at ways that we can reduce our fuel consumption, which is obviously better for the environment when we reduce our emissions but it also helps our bottom line and saves on our cost as well, which translates into being able to offer our customers low fares and our employees great benefits so this has been part of our business strategy definitely, I think, since our beginning honestly with a much larger focus in the last decade to do what we can do reduce our impact on the environment.

John: Let’s talk about fuel efficiency since it is such a big part of your industry and of your airlines and you guys use a bunch of this fuel o make your great planes go. How do you now look on a macro basis and on a micro basis and create more fuel efficiencies around all of your processes and procedures?

Laurel: Sure. If you look at just last year, we invested about $400 million into projects to improve our fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. That’s very important. If you look at just a couple of our different programs, just flying our aircraft, we use a satellite-based navigations called Require Navigation Performance and it basically just kind of brings together GPS like you have on your car and it makes a more efficient air space system. It allows our pilots to fly a more efficient route so if you think without satellite, it’s kind of like a stair step down when you’re on your descent and this is more of a direct line so that saves us on fuel. If you ever are on one of our jets and you look out the window, you might notice that we have these little tips up on the wings. Those winglets actually help us save on fuel as well and help with the aerodynamics of our aircraft and we have those on all of our 700s. We also do things like single engine taxi when we land to help save on fuel so if you look at all of these fuel efficiency efforts that we have going on, we saved about 29 million gallons of fuel last year, which if you want to put that into a trip equation, it’s about 4,500 round trips between Chicago and Las Vegas, so that’s kind of the fuel there.

John: Wow, and talk a little bit about the greening of airplanes. There’s so many things we read in the media about greening airplanes. Does Southwest actually have like a beta green plane? You’re on Green is Good today, so we want you to talk about does Southwest have like a green plane in the works or is there one already created and what’s going on with creating a green plane?

Laurel: Sure, so actually, in 2009, we launched what we called a green plane and on that green plane, we were testing different types of sustainable material like with our leather seats so made out of recyclable material. The carpet on our aircraft previously was just laid in one large roll so we actually tested out different carpets that were laid in tiles so just to reduce our impact of what we were putting in the landfills with carpet. If it had to be replaced, we weren’t ripping up an entire carpet on an aircraft. We just replaced tiles so we tested different things and actually in January of last year, we unveiled our new Evolve interior, which is basically our findings of what worked best on the green plane and a lot of what we took into account was obviously wear and tear and making sure that we were improving our customer experience but we had a lot of our customers tell us what they thought about it from a comfort perspective as well so with the Evolve interior, the leather seat covers are made from recyclable materials. The carpet, again, is laid in tiles. Actually, now with the new seat covers that we have, it’s actually ended up making our plane about 635 pounds lighter and so that reduces fuel as well so we’re very excited about that. We’re now retrofitting all of our Boeing 737 700s with the Evolve Interior so in the process of retrofitting our classic fleet with the 300s with Evolve as well and our new Dash 800s, which have about 20% more seating capacity, those are coming out of the Boeing factory with the new Evolve interior.

John: It’s so fascinating. So, you actually took three years to really test, get feedback, test again, and come up with what was gonna be then your final interior to roll out. That took about three years? You said 2009 to 2012, right?

Laurel: Absolutely. Yeah, we wanted to do testing from just the wear and tear perspective because if we’re gonna retrofit our entire fleet, we want to make sure that was the right investment, not only from the environmental perspective and getting basically, a much more innovative, sustainable interior, but improving our customer experience at the same time so another thing we were able to do is with this complete new retrofit, we actually maintained and used our seat frames so we weren’t pulling out all of these metal seat frames and putting them into the landfills. We were reusing those and improving the seat with a better cushion and that type of thing and the lather that’s actually coming off of those aircrafts, we’re currently investigating opportunities to repurpose that leather for our hopefully a very good cause so we will have exciting news on that probably next year but we’re currently housing all of that leather coming off because we don’t want that to go into the landfills either. 

John: And, for our listeners who’ve just joined us, we’re so happy and honored to have Laurel Moffat on with us from Southwest Airlines. She’s talking to us about greening Southwest Airlines and all the great work they’re doing and for those who want to see more of what Southwest Airlines is doing, please go to southwestairlines.com. Laurel, we’re talking about greening the planes. How long does that take to roll out across your massive fleet?

Laurel: We started retrofitting our aircrafts last January, and we actually hope to be completed with all of that by the end of this year so it’s amazing how quickly our mechanics can get in there and put the Evolve Interior in a plane. When we started, it took about 12 hours for our mechanics to retrofit an entire aircraft so they really just do it overnight and they’ve actually gotten a lot more efficient in doing that and so they have it down to about eight hours to retrofit an entire aircraft with 143 seats so it’s pretty impressive.

John: I’m on your website now and I’m on the citizenship part of it and it’s just really wonderful and there’s so much great information here and I see the big R word — recycling. What are you doing on board with regards to recycling that sets you apart from other airlines?

Laurel: We actually rolled out a co-mingled recycling program. We partnered with Republic Services and it’s really amazing to see how much we recycled since we rolled out the program and honestly, it would not be possible without our flight attendants reminding our customers that we recycle and to hand those over after they’re finished with their beverage and then our provisioning agents who service our aircrafts and stock them with the drinks and peanuts and pretzels that we have on our aircraft, they remove that and the Republic picks it up so through that commingled recycling, we’ve been able to divert about 9,800 tons of material out of landfills and this is since 2008 and 9,800 tons sounds like a lot. It’s about the weight of 233 of our planes so that’s quite a lot of waste that we’re diverting out of our landfills that we’re so proud of but just so thrilled that our employees really embrace it and advocate and encourage each other to participate in it so we can reduce that impact.

John: And, that continues to grow so the recycling is successful and just continuing to grow.

Laurel: Absolutely, and we have a goal in the next five years to continue increasing that about 2%, which we were able to achieve last year as well.

John: That’s amazing, and I’m on your site and I’m also now seeing something called Green Filter. I don’t quite get it. Can you explain what that means on the ground, Southwest Green Filter?

Laurel: Absolutely, so our employees just kind of have this ingrained in them but just to operate with the green filter in everything that they’re doing to be just conservative and conscious about every aluminum can matters. Any way that we can reduce fuel matters and so our employees really embrace that. For example, one way that we operate with the green filter on the ground is through our electric ground support equipment so if you think about our tags that we attach to our customers’ bags for connecting customer son their flight, those we have been retrofitting with cleaner burning diesel and so that reduces fuel and right now, we have about 1,500 of those cleaner burning ground service equipment and last year, we saved about 60,000 gallons of fuel with that effort.

John: Approximately, give me a rough number. How many employees does Southwest employ?

Laurel: We have 46,000 employees, and that includes Airtram Airways, since we purchased them in 2010.

John: So, you have about 46,000 employees and so when did you create the sustainability efforts that then prompted you to make a green team? How did that happen and who’s involved with the green team? How many people and from what divisions? How does that really work? Because there’s so many companies out there that say we could be green but man, that’s a lot of work. How do we do that? Explain how this all came together for you and what it looks like today

Laurel: Sure, and I think I mentioned it earlier, but honestly, I feel like our employees operating with the green filter since we started flying in 1971 to be kind of a scrappy airline and do more with less and it’s really an easy thing. Our employees it was almost just putting that word out there, sustainability and green, because they were already doing it and so our green team, we’ve formed probably back in 2007 and that team, it meets at headquarters here in Dallas and we’ve got employees from all different departments across the company, which is great. We’ve got technology and finance and communication and marketing and all of our operational departments are in there as well and we all kind of meet to find ways that we can be more innovative, how can we collaborate more together and continue building on the green efforts that we currently have. We also have green ambassadors in our work locations so we basically recruited for ambassadors across the company wide event, folks that just love green and they want to encourage their co-workers to participate and have that green filter as well while they’re working and so they’re kind of at our airports to continue that message and encourage and educate our employees on the green efforts that we’re doing and sharing work tips on how they can live and work green.

John: So, really what you’re saying is the company started, it was always the David and Goliath battles and it was always the scrappy one and that’s what also made the DNA and the cultural switch not really difficult because it was always in your culture to do more with less. So now that the green team is created in 2007 and everybody’s all in, it’s not just one department trying to push others along. Everybody’s in. Everybody’s loving it so explain to me what are the green team projects and how do they participate? Tell me what they touch and some of the ideas that they’ve rolled out over the last six years.

Laurel: Sure. One thing that we have a campaign we’ve recently done is we asked our employees how can we save $5 a day and we just opened it up to have our employees share ideas with us. One thing that we are in the works of doing is at our ticket counters, when a customer shows up and they have a car seat, we typically put it in a large plastic bag so if you can imagine, and especially during the summer time with families traveling on vacation, how many car seats and strollers we get, that’s a lot of waste so for a while, our employees have been asking for a solution for these plastic car seat bags we have and so getting that suggestion, basically, the green team is investigating opportunities of how we can replace that with a sustainable bag that we could maybe potentially sell at the ticket counter so it could be solving the problem of getting those plastic bags, that we’re not putting those in our landfills and it could be a revenue opportunity for Southwest and a service to our customers.

John: We’re down to the last two minutes or so, Laurel. Share about your customers now. How much do they know about all these amazing things you’re doing in the green space and with the Evolve Interior and the green plane and how do you get them involved and engage them with your environmental initiatives?

Laurel: We’ve got the Green Tuesdays so that’s a way for us to share those tips and things that are going on with us but honestly, we ask them. Southwest is very active in the social media space on Facebook and Twitter. With those combined, we have over 5 million fans and followers and so sometimes, we’ll share links to our Green Tuesday blog posts and ask our customers is there anything that you see we could do to improve upon and here’s what happened when we did that one time. We had a customer who said every time I check in for my flight, I print out my boarding pass and we have advertisements on our boarding passes and I guess with the setting, it was printing out two pages. He’s like this is wasting my ink and my paper and you could help us be green here at home when we’re printing out our boarding pass if there’s a way to get it on one page so I actually saw that, reached out to a technology person that was on our green team. She looked into it, saw that she could change it to a setting to get it all on one page and so we were able to circle back to our customer and say thank you so much for your attention. Now it’s all on one page so that’s just one example. We are always engaging our customers to be a part of new things that we’re looking into so it was very important to us when we were testing the green planes so things that we rolled out with the new Evolve Interior were things that our customers were asking for and things that were important to them.

John: That’s so great, and for our listeners out there, we’ve just spent the better part of the last half-hour with Laurel Moffat who’s the Chief of Messaging, all things green for Southwest Airlines and for our listeners that want to learn more about Southwest and all their green initiatives, please go to Southwest.com. You can go to the citizenship section, which I’ve been on during the whole show. It just has a whole list of things that Laurel talked about plus much more and they’re really doing the green thing. We’ve gotta support them. They’re doing the right thing and we’ve gotta support great brands that do this kind of stuff. Laurel Moffat, you’re a green ambassador and truly living proof that green is good.

Laurel: Thank you.

John Shegerian: This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy; and is the largest fully integrated IT and Electronics Asset Disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIdirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. This is a very special edition as I have my 2 partners on with us today, Daniel Hennes and Brendan Egan. We’ve got with us today the Founder and CEO of INFLCR, Jim Cavale. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Jim.

Jim Cavale: Great to be here guys. Excited to talk.

John: Hey, listen. My audience knows my 2 partners really well, Daniel and Brendan, and they know what they’re doing over at Engage, but we’re going to get into that a little later. But, first, Jim, tell us a little bit about your backstory. You have a fascinating backstory, both as an athlete and as a businessman. Can you share a little bit about where you grew up, how you even got to where you are today?

Jim: Yes. It’s funny. I’m a former student-athlete. I played college baseball. My journey and passion for baseball really led me into my career as an entrepreneur. I’m from Upstate New York, Syracuse. If you’re familiar with Upstate New York, and especially Syracuse or Buffalo, you know that we lead the nation every year in snowfall. Lake effect snow is our thing. So, I grew up in a snowy climate and a cloudy climate, and I could not wait when I graduated from high school to get down South and play college baseball. Because as a baseball player, I always want to play in a warm climate. And so, I took a scholarship opportunity to a Division II school in Alabama and the University of Montevallo is where I attended and played ball but also it’s where I found my real passion as an entrepreneur. I built my first business while I was there, did that for about 5 years out of college, up in Birmingham, which is about 30 miles from the University, and really fell in love with the South, but also fell in love with just the opportunity of taking the things you learned from sport. So, the disciplines you learned with your body, the team collaboration, and leadership aspects, and applying it to building something that’s going to bring value to the market. That’s what business is. I really had some fun with our first business as a recruiting network that connected high school athletes with college coaches, did that for about 5 years. And I exited that business to start building a fitness brand, Brick and Mortar, and did that for 7 years. Grew it from a garage to 47 locations across the country. We franchised that. It was a fun ride.

During that time, I met my wife, built a family. I was joking[?]. My wife is from Boston and Puerto Rican. I’m an Italian guy from New York. We met in Birmingham, Alabama. What are the odds? But we have 3 kids and they get mom’s Boston accent, Dad’s New York accent, and their teacher’s Southern drawl every day, so you can only imagine how unique they talk and act. But we have a lot of fun down here, great family. My wife’s also an entrepreneur. She has a beauty on-demand app called Glow that helps women get hair and makeup spray tents on-demand at their houses and hotel. So, it’s funny. As I built INFLCR, which we’re going to talk about in a second, it’s been fun because it’s been happening in conjunction with my wife building business. We’re in the same building. INFLCR’s on the 3rd floor, Glow is on the 2nd floor; and we have a lot of fun, not just raising our kids but also doing businesses together. INFLCR is something that really is in the mid-2010s. I started hearing more and more about Ed O’Bannon’s case. Being in Birmingham, this is the mecca for college sports. The SEC headquarters in Birmingham, Swag[?] headquarters is in Birmingham, the Gulf South Conference, which is a big Division II league is in Birmingham. So, you have a lot of conference headquarters here and, of course, a lot of schools are around here. Being friends with Greg Sankey, another Upstate New Yorker that ended up in Birmingham, is the leader of the SEC. I started hearing a lot about this whole O’Bannon case in NIL from him and other peers of his in the mid-2010s. I found it interesting. There’s this aspect of NIL is not a matter of if but when, and this whole case of Ed O’Bannon realizing that his likeness had been used by a video game. Here he is, 10 years after winning a national title at UCLA, selling used cars in Las Vegas, the owner of the dealership. He says, “Come on for dinner tonight.” He goes to the guy’s house and he’s playing a video game with the guy’s son, that he’s in. He’s like, “Wait a second.” That leads to him realizing that there’s some value being lost by athletes and a case that the Supreme Court votes in favor of O’Bannon against the NCAA.

To me, that was the writing on the wall that led to a lot of other dominoes that helped me realize it’s time to, after 7 years, sell my share of the Iron Tribe Fitness brand I had been building, and start building something in the tech realm for student-athletes to build their brands. Because while they can’t do NIL today, this was 2016, they’re going to be able to do it eventually. Today, they do need to start thinking of their social media as a channel that they need to manage and use to grow their brand for whatever opportunities are out there ahead of them. We launched INFLCR in 2017. Kentucky men’s basketball and football were the first 2 clients. We grew fast. In 2 years, we grew to pass 100 Division 1 schools and 1,500 teams. Teamworks acquired us at that point. Since then, we’ve grown past 200 Division 1 schools and more than 4,000 teens. We’re probably abroad as well, I guess, primarily in other areas. We help athletes build their brand. And more recently with NIL, we help them build and manage their NIL business. It’s been a lot of fun.

John: Teamworks is owned by you, also, is that correct?

Daniel Hennes: Teamworks owns them.

Jim: Teamworks acquired INFLCR in 2019, about 2 years after I founded INFLCR. We did a really awesome transaction with them that really was tied to a series C, that Teamworks was raising $27 million rounds to fund growth, and obviously, one of the biggest verticals in college sports at that time, and still, is NIL. Instead of raising a series A with Venture Capital, we chose to go the route of being a part of the Teamworks family and having the backing of the series C and just ecosystem. At that time, Teamworks are already at all major college institutions under multi-year contracts, and they already had most of the teams Pro Sports here in America and abroad under contract. So, it was really a cross-selling growth opportunity for us as well.

John: Okay, but I mean, Jim, you already were a successful entrepreneur, obviously financially you did well with your analog gyms and sold your interest in that but taking the Ed O’Bannon case and then starting INFLCR and for our listeners and viewers out there to check out INFLCR, you can just go to…I have it up here on my screen so give me one second here, www.inflcr.com.

Jim, but it’s almost like a prophecy that you connected the dots with the O’Bannon case and that you thought that, “Hey, NIL would be big.” But you didn’t know when so you started managing the social media and online presence of these athletes before. So, it was almost like you were 3 to 5 steps in the chessboard that nobody else was doing that just now manifest itself on July 1, 2021. So, how did you even connect the dots and what informed you enough, as an entrepreneur, to connect those dots so far in advance where no one else really saw it and connected those dots as you did in INFLCR?

Jim: I mean, it’s from a decade before that just making mistakes and learning, right? In my first business, we had a really good subscription revenue business and we changed the model to have more users and make money off of advertising. It was an awful decision. Do you know what I mean? We killed the value of the company with that decision in a lot of ways. In my second business, Iron Trap Fitness, we didn’t really pick a vertical in a market to go after. We try to kind of be everything to everyone, and we watched Orangetheory start at the same exact time. We laughed at Orangetheory. We thought, “I’d never go run on treadmills in a group fitness environment. Why would they do it?” But in Orangetheory, we’re going to help women who want to sweat a lot and feel like they’re in a club again, and they attack that market and they went from 0 to 500 gyms while we went from 0 to 50, and I learned you had a focus on 1 market. So, I had all these learnings from mistakes. Those are 2 of many. One mistake as entrepreneurs makes a lot is they get so passionate about their idea that they don’t go to the market with the idea, even before it’s [inaudible] before I spent a bunch of money on it to see what the market says; and learn what will the market write a check for. Because the market will talk to you with their checkbook, kind of an old-school reference for the younger audience. They’ll talk to you with their venom[?].

Anyway, so to me, taking that principle, take your concept and idea and let the market take it to where it needs to be. And then the second principle was Instagram, a lot of tech companies have taught us this, find[?] one sticky clean hook to get users and then you can do all the other things later. And so, brochures and videos are I went out into the market to see if they would write a check for talking to Calipari and Kentucky, talking to Gus Malzahn in Auburn. Through[?] connections I had for my first business, I can set those conversations up through those visits. I realized the kids, student-athletes, were lining up at the locker room for the photographer and videographer to give them pictures and videos after the game. They wanted pictures and videos of that so they can share them on social. And so, I realized if we just start there, if we just create an app, it’s easy to organize and personalize all the pictures and videos for each athlete in real-time after the game is over. They’ll be in there every day and the schools will pay for it. And sure enough, schools paid for it and kids used it, and then you build the NIL stuff that’s coming. Then, you build stuff even before NIL. Like helping them understand how much their followers have grown and what that could be worth of their approach in INFLCR and those kinds of things. And so, Instagram would have that pictures. You’re going to share pictures, not even on Instagram. Why? You got Instagram stories, which was done just by building Snapchat and their Instagram. Get Instagram reels, which is then building TikTok and Instagram. You got to get your audience first then you can expound on your feature set. And so to me, this was a perfect way to start before NIL is real because we get multi-year contracts with the schools then we’re going to have the problems NIL was going to create for us to solve later. And that’s somewhat how it worked out. It wasn’t that easy. But that’s the principle.

John: Okay, so, you had such a strong vision and a conviction of what you were doing. How did you get Teamworks to believe in that and when you sat down at your table together, you and the leadership from Teamworks, what was your hypothetical vision as to when NIL would go live? Did it turn out to be faster than you thought or later than you thought?

Jim: I, first of all, want to say that I love predicting the future and love taking risks. I think over time I’ve gotten better at seeing what’s next, but I’m not Nostradamus. I never saw it. NIL rolling out like it rolled out this past year. I don’t get anybody did. But there were clues. So in 2019, the state of California passes the Fair Pay to Play Act and it’s going to start in 2023. At that point, the NCAA has a decision to make. If you talk to any of the leaders in the college sports world, especially commissioners, they’ll tell you they could have sued the state of California or they could have just sat and watched, which is what they did. By sitting and watching. The clue was this is going to happen. At that point, look at other states namely Florida, who don’t want to be second or third. They want to be first and now, they’re not first because California passed a bill. Unless. they passed their own bill and make it earlier. So, Florida, who we happen to have a lot of friends in Florida, Darren Heitner is a friend and he kind of tipped us off to, “Hey, this is going to happen in Floria, faster. It’s going to move the data.”

So at that point now, the NCAA lost all control and they’re still, even at that time in the middle of the Alston case, which makes them feel a liability of setting yet another, what is looked at as another limiting role to student-athletes with any trust exposure to them. So, they really weren’t acting for a reason even though a lot of Commissioners and folks will say they could have sued the state of California regardless of their stance and position with the Alston case. And so, these clues showed that this was going to start in 2021. And then the solidifying factor was the NCAA pass its recommendations for NIL rules in April 2020, a month after the pandemic really started. And at that point, it’s definitely going to happen. They’re telling everybody they’re going to set the rules in January 2021. We see they’re not going to set the rules. They’re going to wait out the Alston case. In June 2021, they lose the Alston case like they lost the O’Bannon case. Now, you know they’re not going to set the rules at all. Ten states have their own rules, which hurts the 40 states and schools that don’t. So, the NCAA passes a waiver a week before July 1 saying, “Everybody can do what I own[?]. Instead of having one set of rules, we’re going to have hundreds of sets of rules because every school can make their own policy.” And that’s where we are today to the point where states are even trying to repeal their laws. Alabama is one of the dozen or so states that has an active law. They want to repeal it because they really want to limit the University of Alabama, Auburn, South Alabama with their policy. They would have had whatever policy they want. If your school is in a state that has a policy, you kind of got a basis under state law. So, I never saw that last part. I saw a lot of the other things. I felt like the assembly wasn’t going to set these rules, starting at the beginning of last year. I didn’t need to wait until June to find that out. But every school having its own rules. I don’t think anybody saw that, and the lack of involvement from the federal government is something that I only think surprised some but is probably going to continue because I think they’re just watching the chaos to see. If we did step in, what are the roles need to be? And to do that, you got to see who’s breaking. The rules are doing things the wrong way. So, you can set the right laws.

John: Okay. I’m going to get into now what NIL really is for? Our listeners and viewers don’t know, and I want to get into what you’re doing with Engage. But before we did that, were you now better situated to take advantage of the NIL chaos that ensued and opportunity therefore that was created because of the vision that you had to and the guts that you had to partner with Teamwork a couple of years prior?

Jim: I mean, listen. So, Teamworks is a collaboration tool that has spawned into the operating system for the athlete altogether. If an athlete needs to know about flights, get a playbook digitally, if they need to report attendance to a class, anything and everything that the team is going to message the athlete or communicate and collaborate with them on goes through Teamworks. And so, it’s used frequently on a daily basis by athletes and teams. Its company, as I said, started about 10 years before we did and had a huge, huge market share and operational infrastructure that could help us grow faster. So for me, it was getting to know the CEO [inaudible]. Before, I was really even going with INFLCR. I even had a client. I was introduced to Zach, and I realized that Zach loves entrepreneurship as I do. He’s cut from a similar cloth[?] is me. He’s a Greek from Chicago, then ended up in North Carolina. I’m Italian from New York ended up in Alabama. We got a lot in common and [crosstalk]

John: I think it ended up down south.

Jim: Yes. So, we hit it off. We hit it off. When I raised a seed round, he was there to kind of help with that and give me some advice. And when I was setting my investor updates, he saw the growth and I was ready to raise a series A. He came to our Storyteller Summit, which is our annual user conference for all the schools and their officials to come to. We had over at Atlanta, Turner Studios. He came there, saw the event, and pulled me aside after he’s like, “I got an idea[?].” What was an idea turned into a conversation with the board that turned into an offer to acquire INFLCR in a way that not only was a good cash deal for everybody involved but also traded our stock for Teamworks stock? Teamworks is a company that’s slowly but surely becoming the titan of sports tech. Teamworks has since acquired other companies like Notemeal, which is the dietitian tool that athletes used to report their nutrition, and there are others that Teamworks will surely acquire overtime to really become kind of like a Google app for the athlete.

John: So, you’re filling out one role in their ecosystem, but they’re an ecosystem play.

Jim: Ecosystem play. Yes.

John: And your vision was you felt and you saw the chemistry that you and the CEO of Teamworks had and you were culturally aligned as companies. So, you saw that that was a good fit.

Jim: Yes. I think you know with M&A deals, it’s dangerous when a company is so young because it’s a smaller team and everybody’s tied to the founder. If the founder is not happy and if the deals that right for the team, things could blow up. Products young. All these things. But I’ve done things on my own. At the time, I owned 100% of INFLCR and I was the board. And now, I’m going to Teamworks and I’m going to be the CEO of INFLCR but now I got a board. I got a reporting structure. I can be fired. And a lot of people knew me or were concerned for me that I couldn’t handle that environment. But the only challenge I saw in the deal was ego and pride, and I felt like it was going to work a really good muscle for me and my progression as an entrepreneur to have a venture capital board. To have a business partner with Zach that owns a bigger piece than me. Also to have all these operational sales and marketing and other advantages that were going to help us grow faster.

It turned out to be a very, very big blessing because, near the pandemic, we didn’t grow 400% like we did the year before. I mean, we still grew almost 100% but not 400%. But this 2021, we grow almost 3x again. And so, Teamworks has been the best decision I’ve made in building INFLCR and being a CEO that’s been able to do a deal and stay. It has been a lot of fun for me to prove to a lot of people who didn’t think I could do it or didn’t things that can I can do it wrong. So, I’ve really enjoyed it.

John: So now, where are we with NIL? And how did you meet Daniel and the partners that he has at Engage? Daniel is living almost through the flow of your career. Dale’s[?] partnering with great entrepreneurs just like you did with Zach. He’s looking for great people to partner with as well culturally and also in terms of vision. Where is NIL right now? What does NIL mean for our listeners and viewers out there that have no clue what that acronym stands for and then why Engage and INFLCR?

Jim: So first of all, NIL is just for the layperson, every athlete has a name, image, and likeness that they sign away when they play college sports and the school can use their name, image, or likeness on the media guide. The media can use it in promos for the game. They can use the athlete’s name, image, or likeness on the tickets. I mean, you name it, right? EA Sports could use them to a degree in video games, right? So, that is not happening anymore. The waiver that NCAA passed last June 20 21, basically [inaudible] that by law and provided an avenue for student-athletes to be able to monetize and manage their name, image, and likeness in a way that’s never been possible before. So, whether they want to do an endorsement for a company, whether they want to make an appearance for a company, signed autographs, sell apparel, you name it. There are things they couldn’t do before that weren’t even profiting them. But they want to do like raising money for a charity. There are so many different things they can now do. And so, individuals and businesses can engage an athlete in a monetary deal. Now, the media wrote about this in a way that misled athletes and really the market and etc. to think that NIL is this overnight payment. Because the media wrote about NIL like about Zion Williamson and Trevor Lawrence who, of course, if NIL was possible when they were in college, they would have made a lot of money. But the reality is NIL is the same as getting a 4.0 GPA or having a 500-pound deadlift that you can do 3 times or in playing time or being the best player on your team, scoring the most points. You get out what you put in. And everybody is not going to make 5 and 6 figures, let alone 7 figures, a year with their NIL.

The mere fact that there are people who say this is a billion-dollar mark. Well, there are 500,000 student-athletes. Each of them makes $2000, that’s a billion dollars. So, the per athlete value here is not meant to be tens of thousands of dollars, let alone hundreds of millions per athlete. But it’s an opportunity. It’s another way athletes can benefit. And unfortunately, athletes have been misled. So, on July 1 when NIL started, tens of thousands of athletes posted a viral post that was a screenshot of somebody’s notes app, basically, say the NCAA is allowing me to now profit off of my name, image, or likeness; and I want to let every brand out there know my DMs are open for business. As if July 2nd, they’re going to get a bunch of offers; and by July 7, they were going to be in the money and that’s just not what happened. There are 500,000 student-athletes; 10 of them will make 7 figures; 100 of them will make 6 figures; 1,000 of them will make 5 figures, and the rest of the 499,000 will make 4 figures per year, and that’s okay.

And I want to say that because I want to credit the power of the market and why this opportunity is so awesome. And that’s because you’re going to have billions of dollars flow to athletes, and athletes are learning a skill beyond anybody they make, which is thinking of yourself as more than an athlete. Realize you’re not going to play forever, and start to use the stage you’re on today. Set the stage for the rest of your life. Just like I’ve been playing DII baseball. That’s the great part about NIL. But the part that’s a little different is, “Geez. I start for my team in this other starter for this other school makes $10,000 a year and I make nothing. I’m a failure of my NIL.” And that’s not true. It’s just that that person is taking initiative in building their own business, and you’d have to do the same and you got to learn and have some skill to do that. And so, I worry about the mental health side of all this a little bit, because I think there can be a lot of athletes that feel like failures. A lot of coaches. They feel like failures because their athletes are making a ton of money. A lot of athletes that might feel like failures to the whole student body is me[?]. We’re talking about your top 10% could make some good money doing this, and that’s okay. Everybody’s not going to have a 4.0. Everybody’s not going to start. And I think we’ve got to continue to look at the numbers to support that message. But that’s what the numbers are telling us so far.

John: Daniel, when did you meet Jim in your journey as an entrepreneur? And then, when did you realize that he’s someone that you want to be partners with just like he realized that was he wanted to be partners with Zach? Explain the entrepreneur to entrepreneur cultural alignment and visionary alignment that you saw?

Daniel: Yes. I mean, well, I’ve been following INFLCR for a while just because, obviously, you got to know what’s going on in the space, and I always thought they were very sleek, well-branded providing a lot of value; and also just having friends, playing college sports at Tennessee and Auburn and schools that are are INFLCR schools. I was pretty familiar with them. We had a feature come out on us on ESPN like June 28. And right after that, INFLCR’s PR person, Steve, I think the last name is Delsohn or Desean[?], whatever. He reached out and set a call with sort of the INFLCR team with me and Josh[?] and everyone in. Right away, it was just clear that this was a company that was all about providing value for the athletes and helping the athletes. We are also a company that is about providing value for the athletes and helping the athletes. And I thought for us, I think everyone sort of saw the fit where they helped with a lot of the compliance, brand-building, storytelling, all of those things that are so important. And we have a really good platform that helps them monetize all the work they’re putting in. So when they do everything right, we have a really good platform that helps them, as Jim said, raise money for charity, and I’m glad he brought that up because people really underestimate how many athletes want to do that and how many of them are doing it quietly. So, we have a platform that helps guys raise money for charity or helps guys get endorsement deals or speaking deals. So, it’s just one of those things where it’s like it was an easy fit. The more athletes we have on our platform, the better. And for INFLCR, the more they can be doing to provide value for athletes, the better. So, it was a very simple easy fit. And it’s nice to have a partnership not take a year to execute. It was very, very efficient. It was a good thing.

Jim: Well, the thing is to be one of the places that athletes need a ton of help with NIL is this kind of bookings category, appearances category, and another so many problems we need to solve with NIL. The misconceptions I mentioned before, I won’t repeat that. They’re also met with this reality that the only place NIL has been done in sports before July 1, 2021, was Pro Sports. In Pro Sports, every pro athlete has an agent. That’s part of being a pro athlete [inaudible] represents.

John: [inaudible] their small businesses.

Jim: Yes. And then, they also have a Players Association. And so, those 2 agent Players Association help with is how do you do a deal? What are you worth? When do you do the deal? How do you fulfill it? Where do you go? When you are going to be there? When do you smile? What shirt do you wear? If you’re doing an endorsement, what should be behind you? What should enlighten me? Athletes don’t have any help with any of this, unless you’re great[?] and young in Alabama with CAA representing you and you got to make a million dollars for CAA to one work with you. So, that’s a real issue, and I feel like people just kind of gloss over it. Another thing is student-athletes, our students. So, they don’t have as much time. It’s not just playing the sport. They got class to goat. And so what I love about Engage is what streamlines that for this category that’s going to be a big opportunity for your appearances. For our athletes to be exposed to and that’s why we have a partnerships team that Daniel and company worked with to put this together, neither Street Camp and Joshua[?] Lander and company, they’re helping our athletes get exposed to the very best platforms that can save them time and also bring them opportunities and give them what they need to fulfill them properly so they can make money. And that’s what Engage solves for us and that appearance.

Daniel: The most important thing, before you move on John, it’s about helping athletes get what they’re worth. What happened on July 1st, a lot of companies were saying, “Oh. We’ll pay every student-athlete.” And they’re giving them 30 or 40 bucks. At the end of the day like fundamentally what’s happening there is like, “I’m sorry. It’s nice for the college kid to have that money.” But the company still taking advantage of the kid in that case. They’re paying $30 for something that with a pro-athlete would cost them thousands because what those agents in Players Associations do is help protect value. So with our platform like I take, Velus Jones and Hendon Hooker, 2 kids in Tennessee we worked with a lot.

One of my favorite things about their process with appearances from now to when it started is they now we use our platform to go back and negotiate because they know, “Oh wait. I have a market rate. I need to be getting a few grand. I need like…” They understand their value and they’ve learned their worth. They learn what they can charge for these things, what these groups are willing to pay and not to just accept every first offer. One of my favorite things now is like when one of our athletes, Velus is a great example, he’ll send me a contract and say, “Hey, just wanted you to know, to put this to your platform for final review.” He’s like, “I noticed these few things were off. Am I right?” And to have athletes who’ve been through our platform and used it on their own, and now understand what really goes into these deals. That’s the most rewarding thing for me is they’re getting what they’re worth and they understand conceptually why that is the way it is. So, they’ll be better at picking their agents. They’ll understand how to protect their value long-term. Getting what they’re worth is the most important thing. And there have been way too much of companies trying to get PR wins by saying will pay every college athlete. While at the end of the day, they’re just exploiting them. That’s what’s happening.

Jim: What’s happening is those are great points. I love the idea too, of not just them getting what they’re worth annual but in the process of that learning how long they’re all me to keep protecting and getting what they’re worth, even without you or me or anybody involved. That’s huge. That’s a life lesson they’ll keep for the rest of their life. They will be teaching young people that 10 years from now. [inaudible] talking about. It’s a sad part about NIL is this democratization, commoditization aspect that once again, do we want every athlete to win and a bunch of athletes to make maybe a smaller amount while other athletes are going to make more like…I mean, that’s the market. That’s great.

But to create gimmicky group campaigns that devalue a great deal of the athletes that are in the campaign just so we can say we help this many athletes. It’s a commoditization that’s happening. That is distracting people and giving brands the wrong idea about what these student-athletes value truly is. Because I’ll tell you these student-athletes aren’t necessarily true INFCLR in that they don’t post 5 times a day on social media. They don’t all understand how to have a very good context on their social that the brands they promote could fit into. They could all be better than that because they got their followers because of the position they have for the team more than posting every day. But they have followers that are whether their peers or youth, very, very targeted to the spoiler [inaudible] in what they’re about and very engaged. These athletes get 25% engagement. A brand gives 3% when opposed. So, they bring a ton of value, especially to a company that’s trying to reach people in the sport that the student-athletes playing huge opportunities. And so, we got to find ways to show how student-athletes are a really great deal for brands to invest into and not a way to get around working with pro-athletes [inaudible]

Daniel: It’s funny. Talking early on to just to some of the brands we work with the brand marketers. We know we’re very blunt there. NIL seems like the greatest value proposition ever because we know exactly what we’re getting and we have to pay like half of INFLCR or like half of the normal INFLCR rates. And now, [inaudible] like we have a campaign coming up that I’m really excited about what this cool company, MEAL learning, where I’m not going to disclose terms, but they’re spending a really, really significant amount of money, and they’re paying these college athletes like they would pay INFLCR, and it’s a EdTech startup that wants young athletes to do online learning. o So, they understand the value. They’re doing it right. They’re paying the athletes right. And it’s the entirety of their marketing plan. And instead of just going out and giving every athlete $30, they’re picking 10 to 20 kids to our platform that really matters and our right to come in and shoot content and do this right. And Jim you’re so right like the commoditization of it is concerning for me because companies are taking advantage of it and doing the wrong way and other companies are coming in and saying, “Oh, well, literally, we think we can get this kid for $50.” And it’s like, “No. It’s actually going to cost you 5,000 and the kid knows his worth now.” And we’re trying as much as possible to educate kids and protect them on that so that they know what they are worth and avoid that stuff happening.

Jim: It’s awesome.

John: Daniel’s partner, you never heard of the acronym NIL before. Daniel started bringing it up to you and then you never heard of INFLCR either. Neither had I. Why with all the opportunities that come across the desk at Engage that Daniel brings to you as the senior partner on the team and the CMO of the company? Were you so excited about INFLCR and the partnership and NIL opportunity?

Brendan Egan: I think, John, Jim [inaudible] with us. He was years ahead of the trend. So, I think, Jim, you guys had a unique advantage in this phase from a platform standpoint, technology standpoint, a marketing standpoint. I mean, you guys check all the boxes. I think you were the front-runner. So you guys, kind of had that for the first comer advantage I think. And what’s interesting is Engage, when we got started, NIL was this idea that Daniel told us about and we were like, “Yeah. That’s really ever going to happen during our business lifetime.” Luckily, it kind of fell into our lap.We were just kind of taking advantage of the Pro Sports market and the speaking Market but it kind of fell into our lap as well. And I think it’s something that’s probably as you would agree, Jim, probably just getting started. So, I think it’s going to be an incredible opportunity, not just for our companies but I think there’s a lot of other interesting companies that are going to emerge as a result of it.

Jim: First quarter mile of the marathon[?]. It’s very early.

Brendan: Absolutely.

John: I know, we’re up against some timelines here. I want to be respectful of everybody’s resources. But Jim, I recently read about you, when I was doing some homework on your career, and someone asks you online, what you love about your job? And you said making an impact. And here we are on the Impact podcast. Share what making an impact means to you as an entrepreneur and then give us a little vision on where we’re going to be a year from now with NIL before we have to sign off for today?

Jim: Well, making an impact starts when your founder and it might just be you and one or two other people and you’re all dealing with the client, the user, whoever you’re serving, and you’re just trying to figure out where do they have problems? How can you solve those problems? And so, that’s fun and that lasts for a certain phase until you start to scale. But then you realize that making an impact isn’t just thinking in line with your clients, it’s creating a great place for your team. You have to build a team that’s talented. But a team that you’re pouring into your learning, their stories, your understanding why they’re here, you’re understanding what they want to accomplish, your understanding everything about the people on your team so you can pour into them. You can impact them. You can transform them. And if you do that whether they’re an engineer, a product person, a marketer, sales, partnerships, they’re going to pass that impact down to the client through their department, through their concentration.

And so, that’s one way just through the operation, not just impacting the clients but impacting people on your team. But then bigger than that, I thought for a while that I was being led into getting more into nonprofits or having a ministry or something that I could spend all my time on. We could help people that were less fortunate. And there’s been a non-profit I worked on for the last 10 years that helps fatherless children, and that’s one of my passions. But I’ve also traveled abroad and been part of groups, bringing clean water to 3rd world countries. Seeing all the stuff, I started thinking that’s what I need to do. That’s what God wants me to do. And then I realized about 10 years ago, you can use a for-profit business to fund and impact so many causes out there. And so thinking about your business from a philanthropic standpoint where instead of thinking all about being profitable, instead of thinking all about everybody growing individual, which is super important; shareholder value, people grow in salaries, and opportunity with themselves for their own purposes; but the business can do a lot to support other initiatives. And so, that’s what impact also means to me is using business as a launching point to help causes that you’re passionate about. People that are less fortunate. I’m a big believer. I promise this is not a political statement, but I don’t think the government can solve our problems. I think only we care. And so, we’re blessed for a reason, and we’re not blessed to want more and go get more. We’re blessed to bless others. And so, I actually don’t think it’s the government’s job to solve this problem. It’s my job and our job. And so, let’s go figure it out. And so, that’s kind of how I look at life, whether it’s through my family in that lens or through business. And I think that we have an opportunity with all the wealth we have here in America to continue to fix problems when we’re successful with business.

John: You’re a baseball guy. So, Jim, let’s leave it at this. Where INFLCR is right now, Teamworks is, and NIL? Where are we at the top of the second inning, the bottom of the first, top of the fourth? Where are we?

Jim: Yes. I think we’re in the second inning but I think that the bases are loaded, and I think the visiting team is going to bat around, and I think that the umpires might have to figure out there’s a 10-run rule. Where I’m going is you asked me to predict the future, there’s a lot of frustration right now about just the lack of regulatory uniformity. And I don’t think that’s going anywhere. I think it is going to become more and more relaxed until there’s any regulatory uniformity. I think the way that the system will be played by people who want to essentially use NIL as an excuse to legalize pay per play is going to become more and more of a brow razor. People are going to say, “Well, is that legitimately NIL? What is the athlete do for that birthday party appearance at the donor’s house where they got paid $50,000?” That’s all just the reality of where this is going. But I actually think that while it will eventually lead to regulatory uniformity, I think that like a lot of administrators said, this is also going to lead to Media Revenue sharing and actual employment status options for student-athletes. I say options because I think that with those new provisions that athletes will be able to take advantage of in the near future in 3 to 5 years, I think that new expenses and liabilities will be added to the athlete experience, tuition. “Hey, we have one straight coach here.” But we got 4 because we want to use that recruiting. You guys are going to share the expenses of the additional three. “Hey, we give you one pair of sneakers at the beginning of basketball season. And if you want to have a pair of sneakers every game, you’re going to now pay for every pair of sneakers over one pair.” That’s how this thing is going to kind of flow. It’s going to be really interesting. I think a lot of student-athletes pass maybe the top. I don’t know, 30 schools and sports segmental in basketball and football are going to realize that they actually have a good deal right now with NIL. Tuition is paid for and the cost of attendance stipend. And I think that 31st school and on[?] are going to probably want what they have today. Whereas the top 30 schools are going to look a lot different and sports may be canceled at some schools. That schools have 30 sports. You’re sharing Media Revenue with football players. It can be tough to pay for women’s field hockey. And so, all of these issues running to be opened up by NIL and the reality of NIL. It’s going to be talked about and argued about and debated. All these things are being talked about internally at athletic departments across the country right now. They’re all being modeled financially right now because it’s going to become the Hot Topic of future college sports.

John: Well, Jim, I think there’s such a huge landscape in front of you that you’re going to just like you said, crush it, run the bases; and I know Engage is going to be part of that with you, and I know Daniel and Brendan are so excited. For our listeners and viewers out there that want to learn more about Jim Cavale and all the great work him and his colleagues are doing, you can go to www.inflcr.com. To find Brendan and Daniel at Engage, you can go to www.letsengage.com. Jim, I love to have you back on Impact. You’re definitely making a huge impact. You’ve convinced me that you’ve got this down. You have the right vision from the beginning, and you’re just executing against it now with Zach and the great people of Teamworks. Daniel, you are the same. We’d love to have you back together a year from now and see what’s happening in the third inning of this NIL game. Thank you all for joining us today. We can’t wait to see you on our next episode. Again, thank you so much, Jim, for making the world a better and more impactful place and for all the great work you’re doing as an entrepreneur.

Jim: Thanks, John. Daniel and Brendan are super excited about our partnership, and I appreciate you guys having me.

Daniel: Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone.

Brendan: Thanks, Jim. Thanks, John.

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform. Revolutionizing the talent booking industry with thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have John Schulz on with us from AT&T. He’s the Director of External Affairs, and he’s in charge of everything sustainable, getting sustainability embedded all across the different platforms at AT&T. Welcome to Green is Good, John Schulz.

John Schulz: Well, John, thank you very much, and I’m glad to here.

John: Hey, John, you have such a great background. Before we get into talking everything sustainability at AT&T, let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I want you to frame your journey to our listeners first before we start talking everything sustainability.

John Schulz: Yeah. Thanks, John. I’m happy to do that. I’ve been with AT&T for nine years now, and it’s gone by incredibly quickly. It’s amazing how time flies. About four years ago, I was doing, actually, a very different job. I was working in real estate, believe it or not, working on making their portfolio more energy-efficient. I actually went to my leadership and said, “Look, I want to be really engaged with the sustainability piece of our operation and really making us leaders in that space,” so I actually got pretty far up the food chain and was given an opportunity to transition my role over into greenhouse gas emissions inventory, strategy, energy efficiency operations. For the last four years, I’ve actually been working with the energy efficiency group, and then for about the last year, I worked with the corporate strategy group related to sustainability. I’ve been really very fortunate. I kind of went for it a couple of years ago, and I’ve been very fortunate to be able to follow that lead, and I’m really pleased to be here today.

John: We’re so honored to have you. This is AT&T’s first time ever on our show. We hope first of many. AT&T is doing so many great things in sustainability. Before we get going, John, I just want to direct any listeners. Mike and I are on our iPad and our laptop now. Any of our listeners who are in front of their technology right now and want to pull up John’s and AT&T’s amazing website on sustainability, please go to www.att.com/csr. John, talk about AT&T and everything that you’re touching with regards to sustainability. This is your show, and you guys are doing so much. I want to have a real opportunity for you to share what’s really going on at AT&T right now in sustainability.

John Schulz: Thanks, John. I appreciate the reference to our website. That’s much appreciated. There’s good stuff up there. What I’ll say is when you talk about sustainability, a lot of different things come to mind. Everyone has a different definition of what sustainability means, and for us, it’s a really broad, broad subject. It’s not just the environment. We’ll talk a lot about the environment today, but we look really at a community level about really making contributions to our community in many different ways, primarily in the social and the environmental standpoint. We think of it in three ways. Here we go. The first is really this idea of people and communities. Without a thriving, successful, sustainable community, we can’t go on either, so it’s really about engaging with that local community, the local businesses, the local workforce, and volunteering our time and efforts. If you think about volunteerism, we actually volunteered as a company and as retirees over 9 million hours last year. We really have a pretty amazing contribution there. We’re also really big into education. I mean, look, we all recognize that education is really core and fundamental to where we are, so we’ve recognized that and made a pretty substantial commitment. We have this program called Aspire. Over the next couple years, we’re going to generate $100 million in philanthropic donations to programs focused on getting high school folks to graduate, getting workforce readiness, really realizing without a good educated workforce coming up through the pipeline, we’re all in trouble here. So, it’s this idea of sustaining our communities, sustaining our business. They’re related, the shared value of our commitment to the community. So, that’s a big pillar on how we think about sustainability. The other big pillar for us is technology. Obviously, we’re a technology company. Innovation, investment, these are the core of who we are, figuring how that technology can benefit our communities. Finally, the one we’ll talk about a lot today is environment. Our job is connecting people to information, to other people. How do we do that? But how do we do it in a way that minimized our footprint? How do we be real conservative with resources? That driving efficiency is really core to the way we view sustainability as well, so it’s that broad spectrum, talking about communities, shared value, and it’s not just a program. We’ve not come up with a fancy slogan and made all of our business units listen to this fancy slogan. It’s actually just the way that we do business. We’ve integrated it very tightly into all of our operations, and I think we’ve got a good platform going forward to really, again, like I said, help buoy those communities.

John: That is really a great beginning to understand everything you’re touching. You brought up the terminology “shared value.” For our listeners out there who, many of them, including Mike and I, are great customers and happy customers of AT&T, how does the shared value approach that you take translate to benefitting your great customers?

John Schulz: What I mean by shared value is really the idea that a rising tide raises all boats. If we’re making investments that make everyone benefit, we’ll be a part of that as well, so that’s really what I mean by the shared value and shared benefit of what we’re doing. There are two ways that you can think about how it benefits our customers. One is just in the sheer capacity and abilities of our network. If you think about what’s happened over the last couple years, it’s pretty mind-boggling to think about the devices that you’ve mentioned. They didn’t exist a couple years ago. The capacity to make those things work is all based on our ability to make the network robust. Over the last couple years from 2008, we’ve experienced 5,000% data growth. 5,000% is a stunning number. Think about that demand on our network. Job one for us is making sure that our customers have a great experience, so we’re investing lots of money to over $20 billion last year, close to that amount this year. So, an incredible focus on making that network better because everything we’re going to talk about today, none of it works if we don’t have a great network. So, that’s really the first benefit that we’re talking about, shared value. The other is actually the part that I think is most exciting and gets your imagination running because if you think about what that network can do for us and how much growth we’ve seen over the past couple years, you can only imagine what’s coming. A lot of people have looked at it from a historical perspective. If you think about the 19th century, it was the agricultural revolution. You’re getting agriculture organized. The 20th century was the industrial and manufacturing revolution. A lot of people think that this 21st century is the communications revolution. It’s the idea of how do we do more with less by leveraging this communication ability, by leveraging access to information, leveraging that for efficiency and responsible consumption of resources? So, a lot of people, I think, if you look around, you’ll see that some pundits think that this is really the next great frontier, and it’s that idea of creating a network that opens the doors for these enabling technologies. It opens the doors for these ways of being efficient. When you talk about those benefits, it starts with the network, and then it’s all about what you can do with it and all the wonderful opportunities that it can present.

John: So, you’re very bullish on the future, not only of AT&T and of the network that you’re continuing to grow, but overall, you’re very bullish on what that means for your consumers. Let’s go back to sustainability. You feel that because the network’s only getting more robust and able to do more, that’s going to create a more sustainable society.

John Schulz: Yeah, I think so. If you look at it, people love their smart devices. I was once in a room with some people, and I asked people if they’d be willing to give away their smart phone or their kid first, and you may not want to know the answer. People were more willing to give their kid away than their smart device. People love these things, and they use them for lots of incredibly innovative ways. Think about just even the old summer road trip. We all piled in the minivan, and we didn’t even think about bringing an atlas. The road atlas is a thing of the past. We brought our phone. The phone helped us get us there, and it showed us the most efficient way to get there with the least amount of fuel use. If we got lost, it helped us get back on the road. Those simple things that allow you to be more efficient with the way you use your car, with the more efficient way you use your electricity, I think those are the types of things you’ll see in the future. If you look into the future, it’s hard to predict, right? Who knows? 10 years ago, no one would have believed what we can do with these smart tablets these days, so it’s hard to predict, but I would guess that you’ll see more in this space where we’re connecting things to things. This idea of machine to machine, where we’re getting information from things that will help us be more efficient. We’ve got a whole group looking into connecting everything. Dog tags, cars, you name it, we’re looking to be able to provide information about those things into a place where you can make good, efficient decisions about their use through the power of the network. The other areas I like to talk about in this space are healthcare. We all know that healthcare is going to be a big deal. With the way the population is aging, we need to make sure we are making healthcare a priority for us. We’ve got a lot of activity in the area of connecting to people with information related to healthcare. The example I like to use is of this thing called the Vitality GlowCap. It literally helps patients remember to take their meds at the right time. It’s connected to a system that tells when you need to take your meds. It actually starts to glow to tell the person that it’s time to take it, and it also tells people who care about that person if they’re doing it, if they’re actually opening the bottle and taking their caps. This idea of connecting people to information is just going to explode in ways that we can’t even imagine. The other big one is the idea of the smart grid, this idea of seeing your electricity use. Again, visibility, accessibility, to how you’re using your resources. It’s a lot like, I think, what people are doing with their hybrid cars. I have friends who have Priuses. The game is to see how big they can get their gas mileage to go. It’s this idea of visibility, driving behavior, driving interest in being efficient. All that connection of information and then presenting it in a nice, easy way, whether it’s your phone or your PC or your TV or your tablet. That’s all part of this network. It’s all part of that connectivity.

John: That’s fascinating. That’s really a great platform for a couple of questions that we have. Let’s talk about telecommuting. With oil and energy prices where they are and they don’t look like they’re going to be falling in the foreseeable future, talk about the modern employee, who used to have to sit at his desk, John, but now can telecommute, and AT&T’s role in this whole connection of telecommuting.

John Schulz: It’s a huge benefit, and I’ll tell you from personal experience, because I’m actually one of those people. I am a flexible worker in every sense of the way. I no longer have an official office, but I have connectivity to everything that I need. I benefit and the employer benefits, and I think this type of thinking will benefit everyone. If you think about how we at AT&T use that, we have products that allow me to access my network, that allow me to access my files. We have products that allow me to host a meeting, where everyone can be on the phone together and look at the same information on my desktop. It’s an incredibly powerful thing. I also have a wireless device that, of course, keeps me accessible at all times of the day and night, so people can call me on the phone if they need to. This empowerment has really been a boon for me because I’ve got flexibility, I’ve got productivity. I think the company gets more out of me because I work at all hours of the day. That may not have been the case if I were just going to work at a desk. That’s a real benefit to everyone involved. We at AT&T have really kind of jumped in wholeheartedly with this. We’ve got over 13,000 employees who do it. Last year, those employees — this is a real benefit to these employees — we saved over 8 million gallons of gas that we didn’t have to use commuting. Think about the environmental impacts as well. These are nice benefits related to flexibility and connectivity, all of which, of course, is on our network. The other thing that I think is really exciting is this thing called Telepresence. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not. It’s an amazing product. It is video conferencing like you have never seen. It’s something out of Buck Rogers or Star Trek. It is an amazing phenomenon because you sit at the table. The table blends into these high-def screens that have the same table on the other side, and you are talking eye-to-eye, face-to-face with someone who could be across the globe. It is an amazing experience, very, very vivid. Think about the benefits to the business traveler who, rather than having to go schlep their bags to the airport, get on the plane, fly for a couple hours where they’re going to go, get them a cab to go to the meeting, go to the hotel. Instead of doing all that, you can stay home, go to this very vivid experience, and still make it home for the soccer game. It’s an amazing benefit to the employee, but also the environmental impact and savings of not having to make that much travel. So, again, it’s a product that we offer. It’s on our network, so we’ve really embraced this. Last year, we avoided $8 million in travel costs by leveraging these technologies. It’s really a fabulous platform that, again, benefits the company by those savings in terms of dollars and avoided emissions, and also benefits the employees as well, so it’s a really great product.

MIKE BRADY: You know, another thing I was just thinking of, John, if there’s a pandemic outbreak, like the avian flu or something like that, your people traveling really can have an exponentially huge health benefit worldwide in a situation like this, if more business were conducted, rather than face-to-face, but going the way you’re suggesting, with that platform.

John Schulz: It’s a really good point. It’s all these small things that you don’t really like to think about, whether it’s the flu or another kind of natural disaster. We’re having the ability to work flexibility is a huge disaster recovery type assistance, so those folks can indeed continue to work either under those unusual times or times of stress. So, it’s a great point. Sometimes you don’t think about those types of benefits when you think about this ability to be flexible.

John: You know, John, historically, when we all thought of the cloud, we all would think of the things that are up in the sky, but now it’s become a term of art in the technology industry. Can you share with our listeners who are still confused, what is the cloud? How is AT&T involved, and how will that eventually benefit all of us?

John Schulz: It is funny. I’ll tell you what. If you pick up any of the industry rags, the cloud is everywhere. We are right there with those folks that think that the cloud is going to be a really important piece of our future. The cloud is, at its core, a pretty simple idea. It’s this idea of taking your computer or your laptop and moving the contents or the applications or the ability to do work, not necessarily on that device. Take it off that device and put it in a centralized place. You put it in a place that is specifically geared for that use. It’s a designated, high-efficiency, high-capacity data center that can do that work for you, using that connection between whatever device you’re using, whether it’s a laptop or a tablet or a phone, connecting to that high-powered, centralized capacity to do work. So, you don’t have to worry about erasing any of your hardware. You don’t have to worry about gearing things up and spending a lot of time getting the functionality ready. It’s easy to turn on. It’s easy to get how much you need, and it’s energy-efficient. The cloud is based on data centers that are tuned and have people thinking 24 hours a day about how to make them more efficient in terms of the capacity and the use of resources to make them work. So, it’s a really exciting concept, this idea of having access to your stuff really through any device, and doing it in a very efficient way. The trick here, of course, is enabling communication that connects you to that computing power. That’s where we come in, that idea of connecting you through a secure line to a powerhouse of computing. We at AT&T are all over this stuff. We’ve got the ability to do software through the cloud, we’ve got hardware in the cloud, we’ve got platforms so you can develop your own applications in the cloud. We’ve really got a robust platform available for you. But what’s hard — you hit a really interesting point. People hear the cloud, but they don’t know what it means, how to wrap their mind around quantifying the cloud, because it is such a — pardon the pun — such a nebulous term. A recent study just came out. Right now, large companies use about 10% of their capacity in the cloud. By 2020, they expect that to jump to 70%, so a huge jump in people using this. With that, because of the energy-efficiency, because of the ability to only use what you need, they’re expecting by 2020 that compared to what it is today, it will be over $12 billion in savings for those people that make that move to the cloud. With that savings numbers comes efficiency in terms of energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reductions. The estimate is that it’s equivalent to a yearly savings of 200 million barrels of oil, so this is a big deal. This is a big benefit financially and environmentally, and it gives the user a great flexible experience.

John: For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so honored to have John Schulz today on with us at Green is Good. He’s the Director of External Affairs at AT&T, and his website is amazing. We haven’t talked a lot about it today, but please go to it. If you’re in front of your iPad, laptop, desktop now, go to www.att.com/csr. On the website, you talk a lot about energy and what you’re doing with regards to energy. Earlier today, you talked about telecommuting, the 13,000 employees, and how much oil you save just by that. How much is AT&T doing in savings with energy-related costs? I see here on the website, there’s an amazing study where you guys announced that you deployed 4,000 alternative-fuel vehicles and 3,000 compressed natural gas vehicles in your corporate fleet. What does all this equal, in terms of energy-related costs at AT&T?

John Schulz: Thanks for asking because we’ve talked a lot about our customers, and obviously, we’re very, very customer-focused in delivering a great experience. We realized we need to take care of our own shop. We’ve got to lead by example, and so that’s what we did. It’s a challenge when you have a company as large as we are, over 230,000 employees, we connect over 3 million people around the world, it’s a big operation. Where do you start? It’s pretty daunting, so we started with our evaluation of our greenhouse gas emissions. We did that for the first time in 2008, and we realized we’ve got a couple big hitters. You mentioned them. It’s energy and it’s fleet. These are big areas of opportunity for us, big areas of focus. So, we got after them. We got after those two sections, in particular. For fleet, you’re right. We’ve made a lot of progress here. We have over 70,000 vehicles, and they do a lot of work for us. A lot of times, people just see our vans running down the road. It’s a big part of what we do, going to service our customers, going to make sure the network is working. Those 70,000 vehicles, we took a laser light focus on those things, and we said, “We’re going to make a big play here.” A couple years ago, we said, “We’re going to invest $565 million over the next 10 years in alternative-fuel vehicles. That’s half a billion dollars. That’s a lot of money. Already, in gasoline, we’ve saved over $1 million in gas by switching to hybrids, by switching to compressed natural gas van, and we just announced, as you said, van number 4,000 just rolled out onto the street, so we’re making great strides to our commitment that by 2018, we’ll have 15,000 alternative-fuel vehicles. So, we’re really, really pleased with that. We’re making great progress. It aligns nicely with President Obama’s goal. He said we need to transition off of petroleum imports by a third by 2025, and we really think that this is the way to do that, is a way to make that transition.

John: Besides energy-related costs, how about environmental sustainability? We’re down to the last two minutes, unfortunately, John. Of course, you’re always going to be welcome back because AT&T is doing so much. We want our listeners to really understand because the leadership role that you’re playing inspires all of us, whether it’s just the general consumer or the small business owner. There are other things you’re also working on with regards to environmental sustainability. Can you share some of those things also with our listeners, before we have to sign off today?

John Schulz: Absolutely. Again, thanks for your time today. We’re big into energy. We announced earlier this year that we saved $44 million last year in energy-related costs. How do you do that? My advice to you is the 10-knuckle stuff is not rocket science. There’s so much opportunity just in lighting and cooling. What really makes a difference with energy is visibility. It’s accountability. We did some efforts to raise the visibility of our performance on sites, and almost made it into a game and a competition. You wouldn’t believe the results that that kind of competition can drive. On energy, there’s a lot of great resources and ideas about what you can do. Make it a game. Make it a competition. Make it visible, and you’ll see great results. The other opportunities I think we’re seeing that are really game changing for us is renewable energy space. We’ve got a lot going in solar and wind right now. I won’t bore you with all those details. You can check it out on the website, as you mentioned. The thing I wanted to highlight, though, is we did a really exciting, innovative deal with Bloom Energy. You’ve probably seen it on 60 Minutes. You’ve seen it all over the place. They are very innovative fuel cells, where you can take natural gas and create clean electricity onsite. We did a big deal with them, 7.5 megawatts, and it’s really going to revolutionize the way we use electricity at our facilities. The last thing I’ll mention is water. Water for us is critical. If you think about water in your daily life, you literally cannot live without it. We recognize that that resource is under strain. We’ve done quite a bit of work with partners like Vanderbilt University, the Pacific Institute, to understand how we use water here within our operations, and really hone in on some of our opportunities to be as efficient as possible. Our internal story, I think, is all pointing in the right direction. What I would say is, again, as a final comment, I just would like to reiterate we’re all about meeting our customer expectations, making sure the have a great experience, and really helping our community in environmental, social ways, however it is, to make sure that they’re beneficiaries from the hard work we put into making our network as robust as it can be.

John: As I said before, John, you’re always going to be welcome back here because there’s so much more to the AT&T sustainability story, and our listeners need to hear it because it is so inspiring. For our listeners out there, though, to learn more about AT&T and sustainability before John comes back on again, please go to www.att.com/csr. John Schulz, you are a proven sustainability leader, and truly living proof that green is good.

John Schulz: Hey, John, thank you so much for having me. I really had a nice time.

John Shegerian: This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian. I’m so honored to have with us today, Angela McKee-Brown. She’s the Executive Director of the Edible Schoolyard Project. Welcome to the impact podcast, Angela.

Angela McKee-Brown: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

John: We’re excited to have you and we’re excited to talk about all the great work you’re doing at the Edible Schoolyard Project. But before we get talking about your great work and important and impactful work, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background. Where you grew up, where you went to school and how you even got here.

Angela: Sure. So I was born and raised in Houston, Texas and after living there for most of my young adult life, I actually moved to the east coast. So I went to George Washington University for undergrad and then New York University for grad school where I received a Master’s in Food Studies. And that was the beginning of my entry into the food world. And so I’ve been working in the space for quite a few years since then.

John: How did you come to the Executive Director position at the Edible Schoolyard Project and when did you get involved there?

Angela: I’ve been in this position for the last four years. I began due to a special initiative that was focused on our pledge to public education, which is about redesigning the school food system here in the state of California. So thinking about the farmers and the ranchers who were procuring[?] the food from, getting universal free access to students for that meal program and then thinking about the cafeteria as a place for learning. And so, prior to joining the Edible Schoolyard Project, I was actually working within San Francisco Unified School District on a special initiative that was focused on redesigning and reimagining the school food system. And so we were able to leverage grant funding to do 18 pilot sites within the district. So redesigning cafeterias, working on staff development as well as thinking about the school lunch menu. And from those pilot sites, we were able to secure bond funding that allowed for the beginning of the redesigning of the school food system in San Francisco Unified. That work primed me for the work at Edible Schoolyard. But then as I joined the organization, there were opportunities to continue to grow and grow my work within the organization.

John: It’s always interesting to understand what informs someone like you who does important work like this that’s not typically highly visible. When you were growing up, was this something that was on your mind? Were you interested in going into the food industry as a whole that’s why you study what you did in NYU[?]? Were there other things going on with regards to how you were raised in terms of your politics and culture and other things that brought you to this position?

Angela: That’s a fantastic question. So, you know, I was raised in my mother’s kitchen. I was always by her side learning to cook, learning her recipes. Every night, she made sure she made dinner. And she would cook it all from scratch. One of her favorite things was to host family over for dinner. She taught me a lot about what it meant to gather at the table and how you can build community, have conversations build relationships around the table. That was what birth my love of food. I love to eat and that’s also another thing. I love to eat but through that experience and then really, with the cafeteria piece itself like I never really appreciate it, eating in the cafeteria and I never felt like I belonged in that space and never knew where to sit, never knew what to eat. And that’s always been something that was just… why is it this way? I never thought it would influence my life so much but then through grad school, I began to work in farmers markets, began to meet farmers, understand where our food comes from, who’s growing our food, the different systems that move our food from the farmer to our plate. That’s the distributors, the trucks, the grocery stores, the farmer’s markets, all these various things and began to realize the food system is way more complicated than just a restaurant or a grocery store. I found that to be fascinating because it whetted, not only my love of food but my love of culture, my love of people and just understanding who we are by what we eat. I think my mother’s kitchen is what really has informed this work for me, but it also has just been informed through lived experiences as well.

John: When you got involved with the Edible Schoolyard Project was your mom still alive?

Angela: Unfortunately, no, she had passed away at that point. She did get to see me begin my work. I started this in the Bay Area, a nonprofit incubator called ‘La Cocina’ and it’s a kitchen incubator that’s focused on supporting women of color and immigrant women in launching food businesses. The idea that we all get to do what we love to do and make a living doing that. She did get a chance to see me enter into this space [crosstalk] but unfortunately, she never got to see me at Edible.

John: Prior to joining the Edible Schoolyard Project when you said that you wanted to reimagine a broken system. Explain what voids and broken links that you saw that needed filling of the gaps?

Angela: So, when we think about school food, in particular, I’ve often opened up events being like, think about a food memory – something that has been a beautiful experience in your life. What did that mean to you? And people share all these gorgeous stories and then I follow up with the question of: “So, how many of you thought about school lunch?” I have yet to get a yes to that question. And so that again, kind of this exploration of – so, what is it about school food? And the thing is, is that I fully believe in this program, I think serves and needs a very big need within our communities. However, when you look at funding within school districts, the cafeteria is one of the often overlooked spaces for funding. So it’s often under-invested in. So it’s not the most welcoming space physically, or aesthetically speaking. And then we think about school food service workers, their salaries and such. They’re not necessarily paid. What they should be paid in terms of valuation of that work. And then just access to the types of food that are being provided to our students. So, there are many elements of this but with the mindset that… there’s a huge opportunity here and the people who serve our kids love what they do and they do really meaningful work and I find it’s my job to uplift them and support them and support our kids and communities as well.

John: I am on your beautiful website. It’s edibleschoolyard.org for our listeners and viewers and readers that want to go see more about what you’re doing – there is a lot of color, there is a lot of information. Explain a little bit about setting it up by explaining, sharing your mission. What is the mission of the Edible Schoolyard Project?

Angela: So the Edible Schoolyard project was founded 25 years ago by chef and restauranteur, Alice Waters with a mission of providing meaningful hands-on learning experiences, in gardens, kitchens and cafeterias that connect children to nature, food, and each other. The idea is that you can have a math class in the garden. You can have a history class in the kitchen. Learning food can prompt learning and so we use these informal learning spaces as educational resources.

John: Got it. And so since you joined, how far have you moved the ball? And are you on the schedule that you wanted to be? Or is it a different landscape from the time you work out a plan at your kitchen table or desk to the time you get to implement your vision?

Angela: That’s a great question. I will say that the organization is actually evolved quite a bit over the last few years and that’s in response primarily to the pandemic. Two years ago, schools began to close. And that was the moment that I don’t think any of us imagined could happen. I think it sent us all into a place of ambiguity and so from there, we actually had an opportunity to write a new curriculum. And so we actually drafted two curriculum: understanding organic and cooking with curiosity. So cooking with curiosity is a kitchen-based curriculum. And then understanding the organic is meant for the garden. The idea is that these curriculum are meant for – not just a teacher to teach the students, but something an older sibling or a caregiver, or a teacher could use to provide learning opportunities for kids inside the school building or at home.

That was the biggest evolution of our organization is that we moved from providing resources for teachers at school to providing resources for parents and caregivers at home. And what we saw over these last few years is that- we’ve been around for 25 years, we’ve had a robust library of resources and curriculum and over those 25 years, those resources have been downloaded 35,000 times. In the last two years, those two new curriculum resources have been downloaded over 100,000 times. We met a need that became present at that moment. And we’re able to really be in service to our community.

John: Let me understand, let’s just go over the math again. So for the first 23 years, 35,000 downloads. But then, in the last two years during this tragic pandemic period, three times the amount of downloads just in the last two years.

Angela: Yeah, a hundred thousand downloads. It shows there was a need and we made sure that during this time we didn’t pull back, we leaned in and started producing resources based on what we were hearing from the community and this new opportunity.

John: How many geographies do you cover right now as the Edible Schoolyard Project and how big do you imagine it can be in the future?

Angela: So just our organization, we support a network of over 5,800 programs here in the United States and around the world. I just recently finished a training program for Edible Schoolyard Japan which is a really robust program throughout Japan at different school sites in Japan. That 5800 is just a small piece of folks who we are supporting through our resources. We offer that free online curriculum, we offer online training. We used to be able to do training in person but now we’re actually reaching more educators and caregivers through the online training process. When we say 5800, I think that’s one piece of this larger network of organizations that were part of that are providing educational opportunities in gardens and kitchens.

John: Of course[?], Angela we’ve got the privilege of living during this internet explosion, the technological revolution, and the marketization of information. How does that bode in terms of you spreading the word and spreading your curriculum in the years to come?

Angela: It’s really interesting because we’re an organization that’s focused on hands-on learning, right? We want you outdoors. We don’t necessarily want you in front of a computer screen but we’ve come to understand is that through effective communication and outreach, we can reach so many people because of technology through these online platforms and we’re trying to find creative ways to engage that way, you can get to your screen, have a moment, but then be inspired to go outside or be inspired to go to your kitchen because you’ve learned something you’ve been provoked or you’ve been reminded about how beautiful that experience can be.

John: That’s fascinating. As the executive director, in essence, you’re the CEO of the Edible Schoolyard Project. How many employees do you have underneath you that you need to manage, besides also reimagining, how schoolyard, and how schools are done and the eating experience and the food experience is happening as well?

Angela: I have 17 incredible folks, we’re kind of a small organization but we’re small but mighty. My team is phenomenal and I support them with day-to-day needs as well as larger visioning work.

John: I’ve learned over the years, especially, since the advent of the internet that you don’t have to have a big organization to make a huge impact.

Angela: Yeah. Well, thank you. The team is incredible. I couldn’t have done any of this without them.

John: So to me as a leader, that sounds very manageable. You don’t get overwhelmed with the management side so you can still do the creative work of making the program better and evolving it.

Angela: I do my routine check-ins and we have one-on-ones and it’s really important for me to know my team, know what’s going on in their lives because then we can kind of adjust our work in order to make sure we have work-life balance, especially now I’m very, very, very focused on finding what brings them joy and that’s actually how a lot of our work is shifted because at the start of the pandemic, I sat down with each team member and I was like, “What will bring you the most joy and enable you to come to work every day, feeling as though you had a purpose?” And from that, I started to hear- “Well, I can do this and I can do this.” And so, I thought about those skills and talents and shape them in such a way that would allow for us to accomplish our mission but then allow them to themselves as much as possible.

John: If you just showed in us, you’re in for a treat. We’ve got Angela McKee-Brown with us. She’s Executive Director of the Edible Schoolyard Project and you can find Angela and her colleagues in the important work they’re doing at edibleschoolyard.org. Your mom informed you as to the importance of fresh food made daily done in a family setting, everyone at the table together. Who else has informed you, who else has been a hero to you or someone that you have aspired to be or learn from both – you might not have to have met them, but you could have met him as well over the course of your career?

Angela: That is a fantastic question. Oh gosh, there are so many people who’ve inspired me and that I’ve learned from, and I think when I think about this work, in particular, our founder is Alice Waters. She’s the chef and restauranteur of Chez Panisse. She has helped inform the slow food movement here in the United States and just was the person who thought of the Edible Schoolyard Project. Her approach to food, to farmers, and to learning has been really inspirational to me. We have the saying at Edible about beauty as the language of care. And then the way I’ve learned that to be is that beauty doesn’t have to cost a million dollars. Beauty can be how a flower grows in a garden. A plate of food can be beautiful, a taste can be beautiful, a sound can be beautiful. And prior to joining this organization, I don’t know that I had those same relationships with beauty. That’s something that Alice has really informed in my work as well as in my life, it’s just this greater appreciation for nature and for food in a beautiful way. And then, in addition, I hadn’t really talked to a farmer much before joining this organization. Alice is all about sourcing from the farmer and knowing your farmer and knowing where your food comes from if you’re able to. I’ve talked to so many farmers who’ve inspired me, they are some of the most kind and generous people. And so that has really motivated me when I work because I want to build connections and access for these incredible folks who exist in our communities.

John: Well, you’re in a great state and you’re in a great area geographically speaking, if you’re going to want to mix with farmers, so how much time in terms of your day being a limited resource? How much of your day is spent in front of a computer or on a phone and how much of your day gets to be in schools and with farmers actually at their farms or touring some sort of food supply business?

Angela: I would say pre-pandemic, my day was… I was really on the move quite a bit. I’d either be down at the school campus – so at the kitchen or the garden and then back at the office, and then potentially taking a trip out to a farm or going to talk with a partner organization or going to visit a cafeteria. I was moving around quite a bit and then of course with the pandemic shelter-in-place, you’re seeing my home in the background. My work kind of evolved more to being on the screen, but we did a program in our sister campus in Stockton, where we were buying food from farmers in the region for an organic food box program and it’s something we continue to do this day. That was really wonderful because I got to speak to farmers almost on a daily basis because you’re either placing orders or trying to figure out what’s being grown or what the crop plan was, or just asking them to introduce us to someone else so we could continue to diversify the foods that were in that box. I have an incredible job so it’s really diverse in terms of activities on a daily basis.

John: Angela, I’m sure you go home like all of us and have tough days or go home and some days – you’re just… it’s a frustrating day, but I don’t think you ever go home and say today was a boring day.

Angela: No, not at all. I feel very fortunate that I have a job that allows me to find great joy every day and the work I do.

John: Before we talk about the future of your organization and your vision post-Covid, talk about two major food trends and how they are going to be potentially integrated into your important work. There’s one food trend of organic and there’s another food trend of plant-based eating. Share your thoughts on both of those trends and how do they converge with the impactful important work that you’re doing.

Angela: So in terms of plant-based eating, we’ve always embraced this idea that meat should be more of a condiment versus like the main on a plate and that has to do with climate change as well as just also just thinking about how a meal[?] is structured. So our kitchen at King Middle School is actually a vegetarian kitchen and all of the recipes that we produce are vegetarian recipes. When I think about plant-based, I’m thinking about whole foods. So things that are coming from the garden, that the students are then chopping up and creating into delicious dishes within our schools or our school kitchen. And then even when you think about school lunch, I think plant-based school lunch is actually a more accessible and affordable school food item and then it allows for procurement the shift and for cleaner ingredients to enter into the school lunch space.

When I think about organic, we just recently released a curriculum called, ‘Understanding Organic’ and that was meant to provide students a resource to understand this topic that can be sometimes inclusive and sometimes exclusive. We wrote this curriculum based from the students’ perspective of understanding, what organic means to them. What it means to their family, what it means to their community, what it means to their culture and utilizing that as a starting point for understanding this larger concept of farming practices, potentially labor practices as well as ancestral practices. Organic is also a huge part of our mission. Our founder, Alice is a huge champion of organic and now regenerative organic with the idea of what a regenerative organic food system could mean in terms of carbon drawdown and climate change, which is very much upon us and very much, I think, at the center of a lot of our student’s minds and of concern of what’s coming. So the idea of a regenerative organic food system is something that we’re advocating for as well as building into these future plans, which are part of the Alice Waters Institute credible education.

John: When you put together your curriculum and you’re always obviously growing your library. Do you have guest chefs or chefs of different parts from different parts of the United States of different parts of the world, give lectures that are recorded, that can be downloaded in part of your curriculum?

Angela: I don’t know that we have any of those online but we do invite guests to come and share their knowledge and wisdom with us. With our students, one of the best resources we have for online education, for adults, at least, is our Edible Ed 101 course, that’s a course we do in partnership with UC Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley and we bring thought leaders from across the country and around the world to that space to talk about food and share new ideas, examine ideas and hopefully prompt broader thinking about what our food system can be.

John: Who right now is a thought leader in the food space that you’re following and you’re finding to be very relevant to the times that we live in right now?

Angela: I recently listen to this podcast called, ‘Finding Our Way’ it’s by Prentis Hemphill and they had a guest on there named Rowan White. She’s an indigenous leader in Northern California and she’s talking about the food system through the lens of seeds[?] and the importance of seeds. And how she told not only the life of plants, but they also hold our cultures and our shared histories and knowledge. She’s been really inspirational to me as I think about… I think often it can be very easy to be broad when you think about the food system, but when you bring it back down to seed and the meaning that a seed can hold for so many, she has been huge in terms of expanding my thought process.

John: Interesting. What farming insight did you get that you didn’t expect when you visited farms or farmers during the last four years of your tenure?

Angela: Oh gosh, that’s a good question. I always think about how this farmer named Casey, she runs leisure ranches and just it’s just right outside of Stockton and I don’t think I realized how difficult it is to be a farmer. It’s not an easy profession by any means, not only are you having to deeply understand nature and how the seasons are moving, how the rain and just following[?] but you also have to know how to run a business. You also have to understand supply chains, you also have to understand how to market and it is a complex job and it is a big job. It just gave me so much appreciation for what they do and what their mastery has to be because it’s not just growing food it’s a very complicated responsibility.

John: I sit here in my office in my headquarters in Fresno, California taping the show with you today, I’m surrounded by farmers. As you know, this is the ag belt, maybe of the United States here in the Central Valley. And as you just said, everything you just said in terms of factors that they have to deal with including as you already know, climate change and the vicissitudes of weather and because we’re in California, the vicissitudes of water supply, [crosstalk] It’s just fascinating me how difficult it is to be a good farmer. [crosstalk] Have you ever tried your way down here? Have you ever visited the Central Valley down in the Fresno area?

Angela: I have been down in Fresno once for a conference, the Organic Association had a conference down there. I was fortunate to go with Alice. I didn’t get to tour or anything, but I did… I didn’t stay on the highway the whole time. I definitely was taking back roads to different farms.

John: Well, if you ever come down here again, I would love to invite you, I’ll introduce you to some of my family and friends, who are farmers and grow, all sorts of different wonderful products, including raisins, and other products. I’ll love you to meet them and they can give you a first-hand tour of some of their facilities. I’ve had a chance to go in them and I’ll tell you what, it’s eye-opening like you said how complex and difficult it is to do it right.

Angela: Exactly.

John: So let’s go back to something base. You grew up in your mom’s kitchen. You’re doing this important work. Two questions for you. First of all, are you a good chef yourself? When you go home, is it door dash or do you have your own vision that you’re going to make from scratch, a nice meal for your family?

Angela: You know what? I find a lot of peace in the kitchen, so I love to cook. I love getting out a cookbook and reading a recipe and thinking about how flavors will combine and what I could do differently if I don’t have the right ingredients in my kitchen. So being able to cook at the end of the day, is actually part of my meditation practice. It gives me a chance to kind of slow down and engage in a way that’s very tactile a very sensory-based. I think I cook really well, I think my food is delicious. I haven’t had anyone say no to dinner invites so I’m assuming [crosstalk] [inaudible] what I do.

John: I’m sure it’s great. The future. [crosstalk] [inaudible] about the horizon of your very great organization, Edible Schoolyard Project.

Angela: Yes. So, as I shared we’ve been around for – we’re actually, in our 26th year now as an education nonprofit. And right now, we’re actually at this inflection point where our founder Alice Waters is beginning to partner with the UC Davis and their new initiative called, ‘Aggie Square’ where they will be building out the Alice Waters Institute for edible education. That’s going to be the future of Edible Schoolyard in the sense that we’ll still have our core campus at King Middle School as well as our sister campus in Stockton, but then we’ll have this larger connection and relationship. So you see system to thought leaders and such through the Alice Waters Institute that I think will not only allow us to provide year-round trainings for educators and Food Service workers, but also allow for a space for convening for the health space, you know, the health industry, the food space, environmental space, the arts, and kind of bring them all together in at this institute to kind of… that being dialogue and think about solutions for some of these pressing problems that we have.

John: You mentioned earlier that a school in Japan recently downloaded your curriculum. How many different countries are you affecting now in terms of schools that you impact and that are using your curriculum? Or at least letting it give them some great guidance?

Angela: There are thousands of schools around the globe who use our curriculum and then even in Japan, I believe there are either 5 or 10 different campuses that have edible Schoolyards on their campus where teachers are providing this type of education every day to students. It’s such a beautiful experience like students who maybe don’t thrive in the traditional classroom can come out to the garden but their hands in the soil, move around, talk, plant things, haul a wheelbarrow across the farm and but also learn the chemistry of compost or math while laying irrigation and it opens education up in a way that it’s super meaningful for our kids.

John: Obviously, Angela, you’re making an important difference in both your community and in the world right now doing the great work and the important work you’re doing at the Edible Schoolyard Project but you’re very young, you’ve already had some great experience. When you think about time, resources and impact that you can further make in the decades ahead, do you weigh the different opportunities of staying as a public servant and what you’re doing right now versus becoming a public servant with regards to the political world that we are faced with today? And the challenges that our seem steeper than when I was much younger and also the other opportunities of becoming an Impact entrepreneur and doing something in the food space like Ethan Brown, and so many other wonderful great entrepreneurs that are making a difference now in the food ecosystem. How do you weigh those opportunities in front of you, in terms of making the greatest impact and leaving the biggest difference as your legacy?

Angela: I will say, I’ve never been asked that question before. I’m going to have to take a moment just to kind of think that one through. I will say, the lighting is not that great in here, I do have some grace I’ve got some life in me, some years on me but that’s something I think about. I don’t necessarily think about my legacy very much. I just think quite a bit about the impact of my work and making sure that every day there has meaning, it has meaning. I get so much joy from when I see a kid be happy. You know, they try a new flavor or they… It’s something that they hadn’t understood before and seeing them light up. I understand that my work has a much broader impact. I don’t know what’s ahead of me. I’m taking[?] opportunities but I think about politics, that is its own beast. I think about the public versus private sectors. I’ve had experience in both and I think I’m open to whatever is on the horizon as long as it has meaning and brings joy.

John: That’s great. And that’s a great way of approaching life. And this is your calling for now and if you get… and you find your heart being pulled in another direction I guess in the future, you’ll follow that as well.

Angela: I mean, that’s the excitement of possibility, right? I can’t define the future but I can be intentional about the steps I take.

John: Without getting political, that’s the last thing I’ll ever like to do on the show. Are the politics of the United States though and or California combined, are they open to you and your organization and how you are reimagining food services in schools? Is it an open system or does the legacy of bureaucracy that potentially still exist get in your way sometimes?

Angela: I think there’s a lot of inherited practices that exist within our systems that are challenging and every day I speak to public servants who want the best for our children. And so when I think about that and I think about the challenges, I know that there are opportunities for solutions. And so even though it’s not necessarily every door is open and it’s just walking through because if it was, things would be so different. But I think there are so many people doing meaningful work and there are so many good ideas out there that are starting to have an impact and do have an impact. I think it’s one maintaining hope that things can change, things can be better and then also acknowledging that I don’t think there’s anyone that would wish harm to a child. With that in mind that shared agreement, I think we all hold, there are openings and ways to find common points of agreement. And also, when there isn’t doing what you have to do to get the best for our children because nothing less is worth it.

John: I’m also hopeful and I’m more hopeful now than before when I started this conversation. Thank God for you and the great work you’re doing, Angela. I really thank you for your time today for our listeners, viewers and readers to find Angela and her colleagues in the important work they’re doing at the Edible Schoolyard Project. Please go to www.edibleschoolyard.org. Angela McKee-Brown, the world needs more of you and I’m just grateful for all the work that you do and thank you for being a guest with us today on the Impact podcast.

Angela: Well, thank you so much. This was an absolutely fantastic conversation. I appreciate all your questions and thank you.

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